How were languages first translated?

Well . . . she was from Yugoslavia before it was broken up apparently. I guess there are several different languages in that territory, and I'm no language expert so I can't be sure which one she spoke. When I met her, she was uncle's girlfriend and was already speaking "okay" English. Understandable but broken. She told me she learned by watching television and listening to songs.

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That sounds really interesting. Good luck!

 

What about the Japanese language interests you?

 

not the language, but the culture is my priority. Language is a huge part of the culture. I don't find Japanese sounding that nice, but I imagine it would be easier to pronounce than Mandarin or French. And it would be nice to get started with a non-European language...

 

What do you mean by Japanese culture is your priority? Are you saying you are learning the language BC of the culture, or youre saying youre visiting Japan mainly for cultural and not language interests?

 

Good for you.

I think this English-only thing is a huge mistake. We end up being a nation with pathetic language skills and with little understanding of any other culture.

Japanese seems like a great choice. I'd note that Arabic has grammar that is very close to our own, but slightly more simple (fewer verb tenses) and with astoundingly little irregularity - it's super logical. French has numerous verb tenses and other complexity, but English speakers can recognize a lot of French vocabulary. Arabic gave us a bunch of words, but not so much that it is helpful in conversational Arabic.

 

Interesting.

Some states now have bilingual schools. My sister got her kids into a school that teaches in English and Spanish at the 1st grade level. Students have different native languages. Classes are taught in one language - that is, if you're taking middle school civics it might be Spanish-only for the full semester while you are taking some other course that might be in English-only for the semester.

We should be taking advantage of our wealth of Spanish speakers, seeing that as an asset.

 

I am a historian, so I adore human evolution and solutions to problems. The more different a culture is from my own, the more intriguing are their solutions. Japan's geographic isolation from the mainland, insured a very unique development, which is highly fascinating to me. A big aspect of the cultural heritage of Japan happens to be the language, and it is very difficult to interact and spot the differences between peoples if you don't speak their language. I think learning the language and interacting with people in the proper country gives you an interaction aspect you cannot find in books.

I certainly had dozens of friends who were Americans and Canadians, and studied the history of both countries, but when I arrived there for a few months, I couldn't believe the differences to Europe - or more precise: to Austria. It was quite an experience and I consider travel as one of the most educational experiences you can have in life. I therefore try to finance a trip off my own continent at least every two years.

English is by far the easiest language I know. So many things have a set structure apart from the spelling. It seems that you just have to know how something is spelled, and it seem that it often doesn't follow any logic or strict rules. In that regard I consider German superior. You write according to pronunciation, except with foreign words. When they changed spelling with spelling reforms, they actually changed how people pronunciation certain words in German. Also what I like about German is its clarity in terms of vocabulary. The words are long at times but very easily distinguishable. Something I dread in French, where it is often quite confusing what the counterpart is trying to imply and say. To many sounds have completely different meanings.

The slavic languages are so complicated. Slovene, my native (or one of my native languages), actually has a dual form - hence 9 pronouns, instead of the usual six. Never mind that it has 6 cases and conjugations which imply the gender. So purely from the form of the verb, you'd know if its one person, two persons or more and what gender they are. To top it off the sentence changes meaning if you switch the place of a word. Really a grammatical nightmare for anybody who didn't grow up with it...

Arabic is quite difficult because of the vast accent variations, as far as I know. So you have to really live in a specific country or have a specific region of interest to study it. With the Egyptian version of Arabic, you will run into problems in Algeria already...

 

The regional differences are a problem, but since the advent of broadcasting media there is a lot more understanding even when the local differences are substantial. So, if you learn the standard broadcast version of the language you're in pretty good shape. Also, simplifications have become acceptable. So, for example, Arabic has not just singular and plural, but "dual" which is a conjugation applying to two of something. But, using the plural is common. Arabic has gender like German, but essentially all nouns are marked for gender in their spelling and there is no neuter.

It makes sense that there is major similarity in human languages given that we all have the same language machinery built into our brains.

 

The "Dual" aspect of Arabic is completely new to me. I thought only Slovene and ancient Greek used that form. It may very well be a variation. I am surprised though, because I have talked about this topic with Egyptians and Tunisians, but it never seems to have come up. Oddly enough I remember that they were surprised by the complexity of Slovene when we talked about it.

Do you happen to know Arabic? Because I wonder which aspect of it is meant.

Let me give you an example in Slovene, so it might be more obvious to what I mean, and you tell me whether or not it's the same in Arabic.

I'll use a simple noun: hiša (=house). Pay attention to the endings as it changes with the number of houses.

1 hiša
2 hiši
3 hiše
4 hiše
5 hiš

So singular there is obviously one form and in plural it would vary until you reach the number five. After that the plural form of five and higher gets repeated. However, three and four use the same form always.

But what I was talking about was the dual in sense of conjugation, therefore the changes in the verb. Again an example since I feel it may be easier to explain.

Singular:

I study = učim
you study = učiš
he/she/it study = uči

Dual:

we two go = učiva
they two go = učita
you two go = učita

Plural:

we go = učimo
they go = učite
you go = učijo

I know it seems odd, and it doesn't need to make sense, but the important thing is that you see that the endings of the verb would change and it has to be conjugated accordingly. Oddly enough it has been pointed out to me that only Slovene still uses this sort of a Dual form...

 

Arabic has only 1, 2, and more than 2. Conjugations consider gender, too, so there is a difference between "she fell" and "he/it fell", for example.

In practice, using plural when there are only 2 is pretty much acceptable in conversation as far as I know. And, the masculine plurals are often used even when the group is all feminine.

Of course, the Qur'an is fully grammatically correct. Actually, the Qur'an is interesting in that the fully correct spelling is used, which means that nouns and adjectives are fully marked as to part of speech (nominative, genitive, accusative), number and definiteness ("a" vs. "the") - which cleans up some of the possible vagueness in more complex sentences. However, in newspapers one only rarely sees the short vowels. Perhaps surprisingly to us students, the result is still fully understandable (obviously, or why write it?).

Pronunciation and spelling of Arabic are in sync. The definite article "the" ("al") is reduced or elided, probably because it is used so often. But, there aren't silent letters like in English (let alone French!).

 

How is English the easiest language, when other languages dont have thousands of random exceptions in spelling/pronunciation?

 

I've actually heard that English is one of the most difficult languages to learn, and it makes sense given what you said and also because we have synonyms and homonyms which are very confusing.

 

Or see http://mylanguages.org/difficult_languages.php - a listing of languages in decreasing order of difficulty, with some discussion on why. English isn't in the top 10.

 

The idea of a global universal language has been a cultural fashion for decades.

English has been indicated as the potential world language of the future [and attempts to invent one, like the "esperanto", are in my opinion out of the natural evolution of human societies]. So far it has been able to gain the status of global trade and politics language. It's the most spoken one on the planet as for geographical diffusion [as for persons who speak in English, it's really near to the numbers of mandarin Chinese] ... so that, if this is the trend of the linguistic evolution, English will be one of The Language.

On the other hand, the presence of other strong languages suggest that in the future also Spanish and Arab [but not French or Portuguese] will reach a similar status.

I think that for an American to know Spanish could be an asset for sure [while a European usually is concentrated on English and French].

 

I think it is unfair to use the Qur'an for Arabic as it is an older form of Arabic which I imagine isn't used every day anywhere anymore. Well every day might be much, because many Muslims pray multiple times in a day. What I mean is that it wouldn't be used outside of religious activities in an everyday conversation independent of the accent. Like everywhere the language changes over time...

But the dual form you mentioned: does that mean that Arabic happens to have a form where the conjugation of the verb changes between two and three people? (like in Slovene) Is it grammatically binding?
Unfortunately I made a mistake in my post and used the verb "go" in English instead of "study" at times. I must have been more tired than I thought. Basically, is there a difference between "we study" and "the two of us study"?

 

English is grammatically quite easy. It has only two cases. The first which is used for pretty much every thing and the second which ends with: 's
There is a difference between "my sons" and "my son's", but these are the only two cases English has. German has four, Slovene has six, Croatian seven.

Something English also doesn't have multiple genders within the article "the". French has "le" (male), "la" (female) and "les" (plural). In German this list is far longer as it depends on the case. It can be: die, der, das, dem, den or des

To top it of instead of the simple "a" or "an" in English, German differs again between genders and cases and add further confusion with numbering of zero. It has the same tense complex as English, and has obviously four added letters compared to English. It is to study a nightmare specifically because of those articles, which make no sense for non-native speakers. In every language locations, cities, countries, etc. tend to be feminine. Even in English you'd say: "The United States and her interest's" not "its" like it was a thing. Even in Latin "domus" (=House) is female within the o-declination. However in German for some reason "house" is in the neuter.

Slavic languages have one huge advantage. The building of tenses is very easy because they usually have only 3 tenses: past, present and future. The spelling is based on pronunciation but not on emphasizes within a word. Their problem comes with the six or more cases and the placement of words in sentences. In English you have a straight forward rule you cannot change: Subject - Verb - Object

It has to be: "I bought a house" It cannot be changed to "A house bought I" like you could in German. In Slovene you change the meaning of the sentence if you do that. Slavic languages also tend to differ between "moj" which means "my" and "svoj" which also means "my". This continues with "your's" etc.

The four forms of numbering I mentioned before and the Dual, but then there is the polite form and the in English no longer used "thee" which I believe was a informal form. The polite form differences are really complex for example in Japanese.

It is also a question of availability. If you study English you get confronted with the language very easily and pretty much all over the world. Spanish, French, Japanese, Hindu, Mandarin are all huge languages but usually limited to certain areas of the world.

I don't know how many languages you guys speak, but to me English is the least complex of them all. It's complexity comes with the tenses, while they are still so much easier than the around 20 tenses the French use. I feel English does need a spelling reform to make it obvious how to spell. If you run into a word you've never heard before in English, you cannot be sure how it's pronounced. That shouldn't be a problem...

 

Of course, this post is ludicrously long, inconsistent in its depth and quite possibly incorrect on some points. But, it's something I happen to like a lot and am working to learn, so I can't help myself!

The dual is a specific conjugation used when the subject is 2 of something. It is taught in standard Arabic classes. It's like the dual you described. I don't know how much it is actually adhered to in modern conversation. And, I don't know what a university professor would expect of students. But, at the very least it is considered important enough to teach to everybody who studies Arabic, where it is expected to be understood and used properly.

If you can read standard Arabic you can read the Qur'an. On-line you can find guides to cover some words that have specific definitions as used in the Qur'an. So, I don't know what you mean by an "older form of Arabic". It DOES rigorously follow the rules and full spelling of Arabic, so every vowel and marking of the language is used. That's really helpful, by the way. For example, the case of every noun is marked as are the associated adjectives, helping to decrease ambiguity.

If you just visually compare an Arabic newspaper and a page from the Qur'an it will look very different. But, the language is the same - the primary difference is that the newspaper omits most short vowels, markings indicating doubled consonants, and some other elements. The words would still be pronounced as if the correct vowels are all present and the vowels (those not added due to grammar) would be in the dictionary - the language didn't change. Short vowels can play a different role in Arabic - not just a matter of spelling a word. It's a little complex to describe, but the result is that omitting the short vowels in Arabic isn't like omitting vowels in English.

Arabic words are highly structured. Most Arabic words are based on a three consonant root with there being thousands of roots. From this root, vowels and some other letters are added in well defined patterns in order to create a family of verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc. that are closely related. So, an Arabic dictionary is usually in root order, not in spelling order. In the end, one can look at a word one does not know and tell that it is a verb (and tell whether it is transitive, emphatic, passive/active, etc.) and various other characteristics if it is not a verb. And, if you know another word with the same root, you can probably come very close to the meaning of your new word. The root SLM gives words related to acceptance, peace and surrender - note the SLM root in salaam (peace), salama (he accepts) and Muslim (Mu often meaning one who, so one who accepts or surrenders to God) and a few dictionary pages of other related words. Dropping the short vowels doesn't eliminate these patterns and doesn't affect the root, so the reader can still read the word, sometimes with the help of context - something we use in English, too, like when words are spelled the same way.

I got interested in Arabic in part because of wanting to know more about the ME. But, as a guy who has worked with artificial languages I became fascinated by the amazing architecture of this language - not just the grammar, but down to the word structure. Some cpu's have instructions where one bit in the instruction indicates whether that "verb" is "transitive" - and, nearly the same thing occurs in the structure of Arabic verbs with letter patterns being indicative of the transitive property. The design that went into Arabic is astounding. I really want to know more about how that design took place - how such amazing design and order could have emerged and been followed so closely for so long. What does this Arabic root idea say about how language began in the first place?

 

I unfortunately don't know anything about arabic to comment on that, but it seems as you describe it as a well structured language. This in my mind indicates its age.

Think of it this way: Any language has a lot of the basic vocabulary, basic structure etc. In German I hear that children who start at first grade can differ between 200 and 400 words on average in German. By the time they graduate high-school the vocabulary has increased to about 1200 words. A college graduate should know and use over 2000 words in German.

If you think about it, that means that the average person can come by pretty easily with 500 to 1000 words and communicate without too much difficulty in German. That isn't that much, and I am convinced that the basic vocabulary is similar to other languages as well.

So in order for this threshold to be broken, and people using more than the standard vocabulary, a language has to have long roots in being used as a language in literature. Being used in literature means that the language gets standardized and that people can receive a high education with that language. Especially an advantage for native speakers! Higher education in Europe for a long time was limited to Latin. Quite late other languages replaced Latin.

Independent of the weakness of the structure, educated people will wish to make the structure more precise. This can be then achieved by educating the following generations differently and you can change the language to a more structured system. German is a few centuries old as a structured language and went through two spelling reforms in the 20th century. Rule changes which ought to make it more obvious why things are spelled like they are and to exclude previous exceptions from previous spelling rules.

Arabic is so old as a language in literature that it may have gone through these reforms even prior to the middle ages, and is by know very clear and highly advanced as a language with few exceptions to the rules of grammar, spelling, conjugation, etc.

Maybe this thought of mine (which I cannot prove or disprove) may be a reason for the complexity and preciseness of Arabic...

 

Yes, that sounds good. But, it doesn't seem to me to answer for the kind of design that Arabic has.

For example, any precursor language would seem likely to have words for everything already. So, for English we took large numbers of words from French and other languages and we continue to do so today.

However, in Arabic doing that is very hard. Since words are grouped by their three letter root, adding words to Arabic means changing them in fundamental ways. They must get spelled in a dramatically different way. They must be grouped by 3 letter roots with the appropriate patterning to show the flavor of that root. This is a very real problem for Arabic today, as the western world has dumped gigantic numbers of words into the world community. Even in French you hear the words from America come through. All they need to change is some endings. But in Arabic, that's not so easy. "Computer" got incorporated based on the root HSB. ShBB is the root for network, sharing with the word for window - perhaps evoked by the lattice of panes. Remember the terrorist group al Shabab. The catch with this is that changing each new word to conform to Arabic language design is difficult and ends up with a word that doesn't sound anything like the foreign word. In English, we can suck in any noise any other language has - we may tack on "ly" or add "co" to the front, but the middle is entirely up to the author - we even use product brand names as words and use nouns as verbs without modification.

So, how did this come about? Who designed the first set of roots and thousands of carefully conformant words that would have been required for anyone to actually communicate anything at all in this language? What caused these early people to stick with this highly structured design whenever they encountered a new thing that needed to be a word?

 

There are usually people around who grow up knowing more than one language for any number of reasons, like a mixed household or a youth spent in different cultures. Otherwise people would just have to spend some time working towards mutual understanding, and that can happen surprisingly quickly and easily through the magic of immersion. You could experience it if you were to try and communicate with a foreign-language group.

I had an experience in Kiev, for instance, where I got to visit with a few fellow foreigners, and except for one member of the group our only common language was Russian, of which I knew very little at the time. It got to be that in a matter of hours I was able to communicate, especially with respect to understanding what was being said to me.

 

Native words tend to be practical to the surrounding of the language. What I mean by this is, that if for arguments sake you live in a hot area like Egypt, you probably natively don't have many words which describe different stages of rain or snow, while languages in mountain areas do. This I think makes sense.

You have to look at the influences for Arabic though. Sumerian was until roughly 1st century AD the language of academia or intellectuals (sort of like Latin is today). Although the language got extinct as an everyday language over 1000 years earlier, it remained in usage. It remained in usage in that limited capacity until the 1 century AD. At the same time you also have influences coming from Greece.

So even in its humble beginnings people who spoke Arabic (or an early form of it) had to have been influenced at least by these two languages. Because I didn't study Sumerian nor Greek, I cannot address the development, but I can give you an example, which may explain a few things today and with can be used for many languages.

"κλειδί" is "key" in Greek. It is pronounced like that [kleidí]. But it shouldn't be too hard to google and to find some recording of the word. The key was a Greek invention. So they came up with the word for the product. The Romans made the word more Latin sounding and it became "clavis". In French it is "clé" and in English it evolved to "key".

This is just one example of how a product name ends up finding its way into multiple languages even throughout thousands of years. It would be shocking if Arabic isn't filled with foreign words which have been made to be more Arabic sounding. But a linguist should be able to answer that with ease. Write a friendly letter to a university professor for Arabic and ask him/her if he/she can recommend some literature which may address this question of your's. Usually they are really friendly and they will give you the answer you're looking for.

If we stick to European languages I may be more of a help. I have friends who're linguists, but I don't know anybody who's majored in Arabic unfortunately.

Maybe something intriguing for you is design for a language and spelling system which is over 2500 years old coming from India if memory serves me right. I can ask a friend of mine again, and I can then be more precise. However, in that system they discovered that humans are only capable to make 52 (I believe that was the number) distinguishable sounds while talking, creating a pretty accurate writing system based on the sounds. Now we have texts from that time and we are able to read them. In one example we can be pretty sure that the person giving the dictation to the writer must have had a cold. That's freaky, right? But due to accuracy it is very likely. But like I said, I have forgotten the specifics but I will ask a friend of mine the typical when, what and where questions...

 

Sure, but your "key" example is an entirely different issue. The word didn't change to some wholesale new spelling in order to conform to internal structure of words, nor did it change to conform to preexisting roots upon which all words are formed.

Your example of the movement of "key" between languages had very little to do with architecture and didn't even change pronunciation by much.

When the noun "computer" moved into Arabic it became "husub", because the appropriate root for the concept was "hsb".

Whenever it was that "key" was added to Arabic it became "miftaah", because "mi" is a prefix denoting a thing (vs. person or place) and "fth" is an appropriate root for words related to opening. The way it was pronounced or spelled by some earlier people hardly seems to have been an issue at all. When they added "open door policy" it became "seaasa al infitaah" (policy of opening economically - an indefinite noun followed by a definite noun implies that there is an "of" in between) - note the "fth" and the fact that there is absolutely zero attempt to keep the sounds of the loan word. This isn't just snootiness. If words don't follow the architecture it screws up grammar.

Loan words taken like the English took "key" always stand out in Arabic as sad second class citizens. You even have to notice that a word isn't an Arabic word in order to look it up in the Arabic dictionary - Arabic dictionaries order Arabic words by root letters, so "miftaah" is found under "f", not "m", but if it was not a proper Arabic word, it would be under "m", since no root was used.

 

"miftaah" is a good example though as the word describes the product... As is a thing which is related to opening.

you have to keep in mind that there are committees in most languages as well who try to come up with a words to describe things. This is unfortunately true to today in very ridiculous explorations. In English the first thing that comes to mind was Bush's wish to change "french fries" to "freedom fries". The same thing is going on everywhere. In Croatian, since their independence in 1991, it was decided to move back to slavic names of the months from the more international "januar" to "Siječanj" forcing the newer generation to be confused whenever tourists come to their country.

I am sure that Arabic has to go through a similar process where people set down and came up with the words in order to fit into their system.

 

All languages are prone to misinterpretations.

 

Marco Polo wasnt chinese fluent.