I must say:
Arabesques are beautiful.
Arabesques are beautiful.
Arabic is proving to be much more interesting and amazing than I previously anticipated.![]()
You'd have a tough enough time with the consonants. Arabic has a series of glottals, usually transliterated as Q and GH, that is absent in the Indo-European languages. Q is the apostrophe in Cockney wa'er and GH sounds somewhat like urban Brazilian R.However, if you care about corresponding each Arabic letter to a Latin letter that makes a similar pronunciation, you'd have a tough time with the vowels.
I thought 'alif was the glottal stop, which is represented by the apostrophe? The same letter and same sound as 'aleph in Classical Hebrew. It's silent in the modern language, after sixty or seventy generations of Jews spoke languages that don't have that sound.Only one Arabic letter is a true vowel as far as I know, 'alif.
Normally they're not written at all since vowels are almost completely non-phonemic in the Semitic languages, i.e. you'll never mistake the meaning of a word by seeing only the consonants. In Hebrew they're only written in liturgical material for people whose native language is something else who are struggling to recite it phonetically.They have other ways of indicating vowels, if they do it at all. But then I guess it's kinda pointless to worry about similarities of sound.
You can learn to read and write Hebrew or Arabic without having any idea how the words sound since you don't have to know the vowels to understand the words.What's very amazing about Arabic and all other Semitic languages, such as Hebrew, is their unique way of making words out of basic three-consonant roots, which seems to effectively make it pointless to indicate vowels (unless you're a poor learner).
Do you ever smear what you're writing since you write backwards?
I heard the left to right comes from writing on clay tablets. Right handers would erase what they had just written if they went from right to left.
I thought 'alif was the glottal stop, which is represented by the apostrophe?
Fraggle Rocker said:Q is the apostrophe in Cockney wa'er
Fraggle Rocker said:Normally they're not written at all since vowels are almost completely non-phonemic in the Semitic languages, i.e. you'll never mistake the meaning of a word by seeing only the consonants. In Hebrew they're only written in liturgical material for people whose native language is something else who are struggling to recite it phonetically.
Dialects sure do differ. I've heard ane for I.Personal Pronouns
I - 'anâ
we -naHnu
I like that, Sam. Jordanian Arabic sounds nice. And I like the accents of the two people they have there to teach you.
I notice the "a" sound, to me, doesn't sound like the "uh" sound you once described to me and that I learned about Classical Arabic. It sounds more like /a/ rather than /ɐ/ or whatever the vowel is in Classical Arabic.
EDIT: Wow, what a coincidence. I was making this post to call your attention back to this thread. But you posted before I did.
EDIT: Now that I listen to it more, I also hear /ɑ/ in some parts. I'm not sure what to think now. I'll have to consult Wikipedia or something.
Nobody but scholars speak/write classical Arabic anymore.
And there are regional differences in pronunciation ; however, they are slight enough that you can be understood pretty much by anyone.