by LoveUniHateExams 180 Replies latest jw friends
@LoveUniHateExams That's so cool you're learning Arabic. I know a few people that were studying it in school. It's certainly not an easy language to learn, but there's a "critical" need for it and there's funding available in the US for those who want to study: http://www.clscholarship.org/news/2017/announcing-the-2018-cls-application
Have you ever watched the PBS program, Do You Speak American? It's a documentary about the different variations of English across the USA. Really interesting....
Also, the Norwegian word for child (and children) is barn. The word for grandchildren is barnebarn (lit. children's children).
That is so alike to the Scottish (this is how it's pronounced) "bairn" (for child)it cannot be coincidence! The islands of course speak a form of scandinavian, So...
That is so alike to the Scottish (this is how it's pronounced) "bairn" (for child)it cannot be coincidence! - yes that's what I thought for a long time.
But Old English (Anglo-Saxon) has bearn for child and apparently bairn comes from that ...
Forgot to add: the Anglo-Saxons originally came from northern Germany/southern Denmark anyway, so they were practically Scandinavian!
And here's another interesting pair - hyem (Geordie and Scots for 'home') and hjemm (Nowegian for 'home' which has a silent h and j pronounced as English 'y'). How cool is that!
But, again, it might not be that hyem came from Scandinavian. The Old English for home is hām.
These two examples, hyem and bairn, might simply show that Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavian people are very closely related in general.
@LoveUniHateExams That's so cool you're learning Arabic. It's certainly not an easy language to learn - thank you.
Yes, there are some aspects that are really difficult. I actually find reading and writing the script not too difficult - my handwriting's getting much faster and I think in terms of whole words and sentences rather than just concentrating on writing one letter at a time,which is obviously what I did at first. Perhaps worryingly, what I find difficult is pronunciation. Arabic is rich in consonants - the alphabet has 28 letters and only one letter (alif) is a vowel 100% of the time (two more consonants, ya' and waw, also function as vowels). This means that Arabic has more consonants than English has letters!
Some Arabic consonants are completely alien sounds to me, an English speaker.
I can draw on my knowledge of other languages - for instance the letter ghayn is a guttural sound pronounced like the French r - but pronouncing certain consonants in a sentence at normal speed remains difficult.
OTOH, there are *some* consonants I've picked up without any trouble. E.g. 'black' in Arabic is aswad, and 'white' is abyad. Believe it or not those d's at the end of each word are two different letters in Arabic - one is called daal and is like English and the other is called daad and is a gutteral, intense d, but I can pronounce it ok and it feels right when I say it with abyad in a phrase or sentence.
I seriously doubt I'll end up speaking the language with any kind of fluency but I like it and I'm trying hard so I'll plod on ...
i'm from Berbigubb--the 2nd largest city in the UK--but i left there 47 years ago. but i can still speak brummie.
now i live on the oilawoy.
i'm fascinated with different UK accents. Geordie-- ( NooCassl)--is almost a song. Scouse is a bit aggressive. Lahndon--awful.
Here's something else in Arabic that sometimes throws me, even now, and it ain't exactly rocket science ...
The word 'the' is the definite article. The Arabic for 'the' is transliterated as al and this is tacked onto the front of a word. It's like a prefix so 'the bank' in Arabic is al-bank, 'the dog' is al-kelb (in Arabic script it's actually written as one word, without the hyphen).
So far so simple. But words beginning with certain letters change the pronunciation of the definite article that's tacked onto them. These are called 'sun letters' because one of these letters starts the Arabic word for 'sun' (shams).
So we find:
shams -> ash-shams ('sun' and 'the sun') - not al-shams
sayyara -> as-sayyara ('car' and 'the car')
tilifizyoon -> at-tilifizyoon (tv)
thoom -> ath-thoom (garlic)
dajaaja -> ad-dajaaja (hen/chicken)
zujaaja -> az-zujaaja (bottle)
And here's the part that throws me sometimes: in Arabic script, you don't write this change. For instance, you still write al-sayyara but you're meant to pronounce it as-sayyara. This is still quite a simple thing but my mind is telling me that a change in pronunciation should be matched with a change in spelling.
Not so in this case ...
One curiosity of English, which I don't quite understand is our refusal to call a great many things by their actual name.
Take for example the three major German speaking countries in Europe:
Schweiz
Österreich
Deutschland
Do we use those names? -Not really.
Or cities in those countries:
Köln
Wien
München
-Same thing.
Or take the word, "Dutch" for example. It most likely sprang from the word, Deutsch, (Or a predecessor thereof) but not only have we applied it to the wrong people, we've Anglicized the pronunciation almost beyond recognition.
That’s my pet peeve in any language: the insistence on calling a place name using your own language and not the native language.
The English calling Sevilla “Seville” or the Spanish calling London “Londres”.
STOP IT!
... Deutschland
Do we use those names? -Not really - mind you, the French are just as bad. XD
Their name for Deutschland is Allemagne. They've named all of Germany after only one German tribe - the Allemanni.
Yes, I admit that German makes much more sense than either language - Oesterreich ('eastern realm'), Frankreich (realm of the Franks).
