互联网与文化idlewords.com
为什么阿拉伯语如此美妙
Why Arabic is Terrific
2011 — 2019,它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页(≥ 50 分)的那次投稿,空心点是没冲上去的投稿,点越大分数越高。
导读
作者以幽默笔调介绍阿拉伯语的迷人之处:三字母词根派生系统、丰富的语法变化、双数与阴阳性等结构之美,同时也坦承书面标准语与口语方言严重脱节、学习门槛极高。文章兼具科普与个人学习体会,读来轻松有趣。
为什么经久不衰:它把一门常被误解的语言讲得生动又诚实,既展示其结构之美也不回避学习难度,多年后仍是了解阿拉伯语最好的入门导读之一。
HN 评论精选
作者曾开发阿拉伯语文字处理器,认可文中技术难点描述,但反驳其对语言学校教学效果的贬低。
很棒的文章,写的是我最喜欢的话题之一。80年代我用IBM PC和Hercules显卡写过一个阿拉伯语文字处理器,好让我的搭档能用波斯语给家人写信。从右到左书写、字母根据词首词中词尾变形是很有趣的挑战,更别提出现在字母上下方的元音了。不过文中对国防语言学院(DLI)的攻击我不太认同——我接触过那里的毕业生(说韩语和越南语),他们说得像母语者一样,包括地道习语。
hsmyers查看英文原文
Great article on one of my favorite subjects. In the 80's using an IBM PC with a Hercules graphics card I wrote an Arabic word processor so my partner could write to his family in Farsi. The problems of right to left and differing letter shapes depending on leading, middle and ending position was an interesting challenge---not to mention the problem of vowels that occur above and below the letters. That said, I could have done without the attack on DLI---actually having worked with graduates (speaking Korean and Vietnamese) they spoke as natives including idiomatic expressions. Oh well we all have biases and the rest of the posting was excellent!
批评作者以英语者视角夸大阿拉伯语的'异域感',并纠正其对中日语言的错误类比。
文章有趣,但作者在语言学上天真,这是英语母语者遇到形态、语音更'异域'的语言时的通病。如果阿拉伯语是你第一次接触高度屈折的语言,它可能显得新奇;如果先学过古希腊语或拉丁语,就不会那么觉得了。文中关于中文和日语的评论很可笑——中文句法简单,日语句法却复杂。面对汉字的震撼部分是错觉:确实要背很多东西,但认识约200个部首后,很多词义可以猜出来。
Jun8查看英文原文
Interesting post but the OP is linguistically naive, which is generally what happens when English speakers encounter another language with more interesting (i.e. exotic") morphological, phonetical, etc. elements. If Arabic if your first foray into a highly inflectional language, it might look fairly exotic. If you had studied, say ancient Greek or Latin, first, it might look less so. "you find out that the underlying language is pretty vanilla, and meanwhile there is a stack of three thousand flash cards standing in between you and the ability to skim a newspaper." This comment about Chinese and Japanese (totally unrelated languages with very different writing systems, is laughable. The syntax of Chinese is simple (it pretty much has non at all) but Japanese syntax is complicated. The OMG moment one faces when faced with thousands or weird Chinese signs is partly an illusion. Yes, you have to memorize a lot of things, like any other languages, but the meaning of a Chinese word can be guessed if you know the determinitve, even f you don't know the word. There are only about 200 determinitives. An interesting thing about Arabic is that, due to its tie to Koran, it's been studied linguistically since early times. But other languages can also boast such long examined lives, e.g. Sanskrit or Chinese.
母语者指出文中若干语言事实错误,为阿拉伯语语法的规律性正名。
我是阿拉伯语母语者,喜欢这篇文章,但有几处错误:复数例外情况远少于规则变化,大多数阿拉伯语名词复数遵循明确规则;形容词没有性别之分;正式读数字时是从右往左、从最低位读起,虽然很少有人这么做;普通人几乎不可能读懂一千年前的书面文本,包括《古兰经》。
gmi01查看英文原文
I am a native Arabic speaker, I enjoyed the article, however there are a few mistakes. In 2. The exceptions are called plural exceptions which happen much less than the general rule, Otherwise most of Arabic follows a very specific rule to making plurals from singulars. In 7. Adjectives have no gender, and therefore al-kutub hadra' (الكتب حضراء) "The books, she is green" this translates to the books are green (hadra is an adjective and has no gender) In 9. Formally Arabic numbers are read right to left, i.e. we read the least significant digit first. Although very few people do this. In 10. It is next to impossible to understand any written text which is a 1000 years by the average Joe, including the Qur'an
肯定阿拉伯语的结构之美,但提醒标准语与方言脱节会削弱实用性,并推荐在线词典工具。
完全同意——阿拉伯语很美,学起来是种享受,特别适合喜欢结构和规律的人(比如计算机和数学背景的!)。但要当心:现代标准阿拉伯语(多数教材的重点)与各地方言差异巨大,方言之间也互不相同,这可能让它不如你期望的那么实用,等你真去和人交流时会失望。顺便推荐我的小项目 arabicreference.com,是学生标准词典 Hans Wehr 的在线版,可按词根或单词检索。
ztravis查看英文原文
I absolutely agree - Arabic is a beautiful language and a joy to learn, and it is particularly appealing for those who enjoy structure and regularity (e.g. CS and math folk!). Be forewarned, though - the significant differences between MSA (modern standard Arabic, the focus of most "Arabic" courses/material) and regional/national dialects (and the differences between those various dialects themselves) may make it a bit less practical than you'd hope (and a source of disappointment when you go to actually speak with people!). Permit me to plug a pet project of mine: http://arabicreference.com It's basically an online version of Hans Wehr, the de facto standard dictionary for students of Arabic. You can search by root or by word and provides form I vowelling, masadir (infinitives), broken plurals, and other useful information organized by form. I know there exist other good dictionaries out there, but I never found one I quite liked as a reference as much as I enjoyed Hans Wehr. I hope someone else finds it useful! (I've been neglecting it a bit recently, so I apologize for any bugs and for the lack of an SSL cert).
母语者指出文中双数阴阳性等语法在实际口语中并不使用,印证书面语与口语的鸿沟。
关于'没有哪种语言会让你费这么大劲避免与两位女性正式交谈'这句:阿拉伯人实际并不这样正式说话,你这么说他们可能觉得奇怪(在利比亚或埃及甚至可能听不懂);大多数口语方言跳过了这些规则。但作者自己也总结了:书面语和口语分歧巨大,你正式学多年也可能看不懂一条电视广告。
istajeer242查看英文原文
Excellent article on a very logical language. However this part: > No other language will make you work as hard to avoid speaking formally to pairs of women Arabs actually don't speak this formal way and may look at you strange if you do (they may not even understand in countries like Libya or Egypt); most of the colloquial dialects skip most of these rules, and don't deal the difference between "those two females ran" vs "those two males ran" vs "those males ran", etc. But author summarizes it: > The second is that spoken Arabic has diverged substantially from the written language, so you can study it formally for years and not be able to understand a television commercial
历次讨论
同类还值得读
如今电脑上几乎所有操作在感知上都比 1983 年更慢(2017)
Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
2017 年的推文串认为,尽管计算机硬件比 1983 年快得多,日常操作的感知速度却常常更慢:启动、界面响应和网络应用被层层抽象、动画、后台检查与网络依赖拖累。
互联网与文化上首页 5 次 · 2017–2020twitter.com网站肥胖危机
The Website Obesity Crisis
Maciej Cegłowski(idlewords)的经典演讲文稿《网站肥胖症危机》,批评现代网页越来越臃肿:动辄数 MB 的 JavaScript、追踪脚本和广告,把本可以轻…
互联网与文化上首页 5 次 · 2016–2021idlewords.com编辑精选亚马逊那本标价 23,698,655.93 美元的苍蝇书
Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
博文讲的是亚马逊上一本关于果蝇的二手书被标到 23,698,655.93 美元。
互联网与文化上首页 5 次 · 2011–2022michaeleisen.org浏览器 User-Agent 字符串的历史
History of the browser user-agent string (2008)
2008 年的经典文章用戏谑的“创世纪”口吻,讲述浏览器 User-Agent 字符串如何从简单的标识演变成层层叠加的伪装:浏览器为了绕过按 UA 分发的网站检测,纷纷把自己伪装…
互联网与文化上首页 5 次 · 2012–2022webaim.org编辑精选最后的问题——艾萨克·阿西莫夫
The Last Question - Isaac Asimov
阿西莫夫最著名的短篇科幻小说《最后的问题》的在线全文。
互联网与文化上首页 5 次 · 2009–2019multivax.com编辑精选