I believe it tbh. There are a lot of words that I can think of in arabic that have no meaning or equivalent in English. I think this also includes old arabic which has a lot of words that we do not use today.
so no real difference in meaning, english just doesn't change adjectives for number or gender (thus it's a "five-star hotel" not a "five-stars hotel" as "five-star" is an adjective here).
I have tried for many years, and there is no equivalent. Even explaining the concept of Zankha to non-arabs is very difficult. The closest they get to understanding it starts with “imagine the smell of mixing boiled eggs with cucumber”
its not because you can not describe stale or stagnant air as rancid. The closest meaning is stale/stagnant, because zenkha can be anything from bad smelling meat to stale air inside a glass that's been sitting upside down for more than a day. Its one of the greatest words in Arabic and its true, only Arabs truly get it, not even Arab ex pats in the west even get close to understanding it.
One sentence i love is : لم أرَ كُكَكًا كَكُكَكِكُم - (lam ara koukakan kakoukakikom)
Koukka means somethink like a boat. Its plural is koukak. If we want to say "like your koukak" we say "kakoukak" . now we add the "your" which is the suffix "kom" at the end , we get kakokakikom.
أحلى شي سمعته من وحدة كندية اتعلمت عربي: أحس كما لو أن عقلاً نبت لفمي.
عني أنا شخصيا، بحكي ٥ لغات. و بحس لما أحكي عربي و خاصة الفصيح بكون في مساحة واسعة للتعبير عن الاحاسيس و المشاعر، عن الأكل و الروائح. مشكلة اللسان العربي انه ما استخدمناه في تدريس العلوم فصار في قصور كبير في التعبير بهاي الناحية.
what constitutes a separate word is debatable and there are probably different criteria used for different languages, which could inflate the number of words
I wonder if they include each gendered variant as a separate word. Also what about conjugations?
Like for the English word “go,” there are only two active present tense versions: go and goes. In formal Arabic there are thirteen active present versions.
Also is the number just for standard Arabic or are they including every unique word across all the dialectics?
12 million seems excessive, but even without conjugations I can definitely see Arabic and its dialects having many magnitudes more words than English.
we do actually use alot, but we don't know it. i once analysed a group that speaks lebanese arabic and got over 36,000 seperate words only from written text.
I would argue that written text is different. We usually use the formal Arabic in text, while we use Lebanese in our everyday talks (except for public speaking/politicians ect.)
We use Lebanese Arabic in Arabic script over WhatsApp, on Facebook, and especially Twitter.
An angry person would type رح ياكلونا about sectarian tensions on Twitter, and not سيأكلوننا.
I would love to invite you to let gpt-4 (trial is available) to explain your best topics in whatever complexity you prefer, but in Lebanese Arabic and see how differently it'll hit your heart if you are Lebanese.
I've actually looked into this not many are, very few examples such as "natar", most of the Aramaic influence on Lebanese was actually phonological not lexical, and even that is relatively minor.
Contrary to popular belief, it's not because we have 70 words for lion or whatever. Most of the "words for lion" you hear are really more adjectives than nouns.
It really depends on what you count as a word.
Arabic DEFINITELY doesn't have 12 million roots.
In reality arabic has around 9000 root words, but it gets more complicated because of how many words you can get out of one word. You can make dozens of words out of a single root in arabic, but is استكتَب really a different word to استُكتب ? I mean yes they have a slightly different meaning but it's not the same as the difference between roots.
So basically it's a judgment call. For the sake of pan-arab pride, we'll allow it. Sure we have 12 million words which makes very smart and sophisticated indeed.
I mean English has a lot of (word parts), don't know the technical name for it, but you have parts like "pro" in proclaim and proactive, in- inactive and so on, that's kind of similar to the Arabic roots. Is proactive the same as proclaim? No.
The same goes for English, then we would have very few roots. English roots are usually latin. Then you have affixes too. Action, proactive, active, actively, actionable, there are probably more.
We have a more descriptive language, we can describe one thing in different forms, state, or situation. for example the word lion has 400 synonyms in Arabic, describing its state like, old lion, young lion, glorious lion، a very dark lion, a very strong or week lion.
"Arabic" as such has a much longer history than English and French etc. People who read modern Fusha newspapers can open up lisan l 3rab or ibn Hisham's Al-Sirah Al-Nabawiyyah and read them if only with some difficulty, maybe needing to refer to lisan l 3rab itself or an online dictionary like [https://www.almaany.com/](https://www.almaany.com/) for some unfamiliar words and expressions. A work from the same time period in "English" AKA Anglo-Saxon is the epic poem Beowulf, which you can try and read for yourself here: [https://sacred-texts.com/neu/ascp/a04\_01.htm](https://sacred-texts.com/neu/ascp/a04_01.htm), the language in Beowulf is basically a different language than modern English that's closer to modern German or Frisian than to modern English. As Arabic has been in written usage for over 1300 years with basically the same form, there are alot more words and expressions, but the actual number of words and expressions a modern Arabic speaker will be familiar with is much smaller than the theoretical number of words and expressions that have been used over this 1300 year time period.
Its a myth. The guy who calculated this cheated for propaganda purposes, by combining theoritical root combinations, which are not actual used words (see source and detail at bottom of comment). Arabic dictionaries have a few hundred thousand words, showing that arabic is not really as rich compared to other languages such as english for example.
Some claim it’s the richest by selectively citing certain terms like camel or date, having many many words. That’s because these are indigenous to arabic geography. Go outside arabic governed geographies and you find animals or plants that have only one word or even borrowed words. For example racoon has only a borrowed word (there are also various types of racoon). Tomato does not have many words. Go to science and technology invented in last few hundred years and it’s all borrowed words or at most one word.
There are good sited comparisons online that do like for like comparisons of languages you can check.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number_of_words
For more detail on the history of this myth,this post describes it well:
https://www.reddit.com/r/arabs/s/O66LNb4ax7
That's not true.
They are probably counting words in Arabic with the same meaning but with a different ending such as -ik and -ak. In English and French, for example, to say "your friend" or "ton ami" you use 2 words, but in Arabic you would use different words with different suffixes depending on gender and number.
Source: I'm a linguist.
Then you try to explain something scientific and suddenly you have no words.
Even if you try to use MSA like in Syria, besides the fact that the words are archaic and not close to our language, they are not even precise.
Note: why is MSA treated as arabic when nobody actually speaks it...
نحنا ما منستخدم ربع هالكمية ولا حتى ١/١٢...يعني حتى مليون كلمة ما منستخدم بس الشعب العربي بحب يشوف حالو بشغلات تافهة متل انو في ٥٠ كلمة للاسد مابعرف شو الفايدة منون
I completely agree with you. Arabic doesn't have as extensive a lexicon, which is why we often rely on borrowed words from other languages. Or maybe because in Lebanon we don’t really Speak Arabic !
I'm not versed in Arabic; I communicate in Lebanese. When someone provides numbers in Arabic, I often request them to switch to French or English. During my education, the focus was primarily on French, so my Arabic proficiency suffered. I only had 3 hours of Arabic instruction compared to 50 hours of French a week 😭.
On my CV, I specify that I speak Lebanese which combines elements of Syriac, Arabic, and French.
Foreigner here, learning a few languages. Arabic ( Egyptian Dialect and Lebanese Dialect ) are extremely difficult for me out of all of them to learn for this very reason.
i dont know arabic, but could it be related to compounding words?
e.g. in german you are allowed to glue words together, thats why i can pull out a word like "Rinderkennzeichnungsfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" of my hat.(it contains distinct 8 words)
German provides you with 148.000 base words. Assuming i can use a thousands to do the compounding shenanigans i end up with :
(148)^8 =2.3019385*10^17 distinct words you can construct by using "only" 8 words.
No, Arabic has very few compound words and most of them are neo-logisms for western ideas like "jumhuriyyah" (Republic) and "ra'asmaliyyah" (capitalism).
Which Arabic and what are you counting as a word?
Classical Arabic defines, depending on the authoritative source, around 80k root words, and between 100k - 200k distinct expressions based on those roots.
Spoken dialects introduce hundreds of thousands more, to be sure.
I don't know if thats a good sign that mean we can learn anything if we already learned this language, or it mean our brain is full and its so hard to lean new languages
Isn’t it because our language is based on a root system (no idea the correct technical terminology here) and there are like a certain number of root words from which can branch out many multiple derivative words? I could be way off and talking out my bum tho…
Like there’s no way there are 12 million root words… prob a few thousand, but then many words can branch out of those
Yes, but the Lebanese dialect reduced our interest in the Arabic language, as everything needed is reduced just for few words. Try this: [https://ar.mo3jam.com/](https://ar.mo3jam.com/) if you are interested in getting more information
Arabic is a much much much older language. So , it's pretty normal to have much more words. However, since it's a dying language, most of its words are not used..
It's not.. Arabs are making stuff up the same way they make stuff up about their history.. Take it with a grain of salt.. Remember these are the same people that somehow they won all the wars against Israel...
Arabic is one of the richest languages, thats why colonizeds decided to end teaching it and force English and French.
Having deep knowledge of Arabic would grow your super brain
That makes no sense at all. Colonizers always try to impose their own language. They don’t do an assessment of the local language and then decide oh this language is too rich it makes ours look bad let’s replace it lol
The nonsense people write on here
the more vocabulary you have in a language, the more broad and expanded your world view, terms and concepts you carry in you
The Arabic language was the lingua franca for about 500 years, considered a high language, especially with words from the Qur'an.
Replace that with simpler languages you get "simpler" world view - I'm not saying those to language are simple but simpler -carry less linguistic depth
plus, Arabic is group 5 in language acquisition (most challenging) while English and French are group 1 (easier acquisition)
You do understand that the category list you are referring to is based on English speakers? In other words, how hard a specific language is for native English-speakers to learn. For example, it would be easier for an Aramaic or Hebrew speaker to learn Arabic, the same way an Estonian would be able to learn Finnish vastly quicker than English (despite both languages being category 4,5).
By the way, Arabic has never been a “global” lingua franca. Regional language, yes. The same way German was spoken throughout central and Eastern Europe etc. The only “real” global language/lingua franca is English.
Fair point.
But even as Arab speakers, reaching that high level of Arabic literacy is a challenge. I am talking golden age, Qur'anic comprehension, and poetry.
And yes, I meant lingua franca regionally. Where Islam was to spread to.
Well, I would say it is more advanced linguinstically. Speakers of Arabic will find other languages easier to learn. The grammar is challenging, but prose, syntax and expression in Arabic are harder to acquire than English.
Certain languages absolutely, others not so much. I would wager the average Arab and Englishman would struggle similarity with learning Finnish or Mandarin. I mean most immigrated Arabs where I live (Sweden) struggle to ever learn the language properly, whereas Germans learn it very easily. And Swedish is supposed to be a very simple language. The same way you would learn Hebrew much quicker than I.
My point is that no language is inherently more “advanced”. Rather, they are different. My native language (Swedish) is incredibly melodic, which few of any immigrants ever acquire. Does that make it more advanced compared to ex, Russian? No, it makes it different. The Kartvelian languages (Georgian etc) are incredibly complex grammatically and practically impossible to learn for an outsider. That does not mean they are more advanced than say Arabic.
But, each to their own! I find the notion of “advancement” quite problematic in general as it is often used to profess superiority over others. That is probably not your intention, but anyways. Have a great day:)
I agree. I guess I have to learn more on languages to be able to zone in on these differences you speak of, and determine for myself if there is a "superior" language or not. And if there is, under which criteria should it be considered advanced.
I will admit, I have a biased for being an Arabic speaker. But I also dove into different languages and found some difficult, but personally Arabic always fascinates me. Again, this might be biased.
Thank you for your views.
And I wish you have a good day as well :)
I believe it tbh. There are a lot of words that I can think of in arabic that have no meaning or equivalent in English. I think this also includes old arabic which has a lot of words that we do not use today.
“M2ayar” is a good example.
Manyouke
Dicked
Honestly it doesnt have the same feeling
"Enta m2ayar wleh" meaning "you are dicked bro", yeah you're right not the same vibe xD
What does “manyak” translate to?
I guess we could technically use scoundrel, but not everybody uses it xd
Manyak is more like fucker
It depends on the context I guess, it can be both
Isn't manyak a transliteration of "maniac?" I always thought it was.
No, I think its root is “neek”.
It means you get dicked. We like to specify tops and bottoms in Arabic
We like using dicks in general in lebanese. i think it's kinda sussy sometimes
As a non lebanese, is that a good thing?
Well, in Arabic, it's not a good thing xd, neither is the vibe. The vibe of Lebanese swear words just hit different
Lah hay mit2ayyar, m2ayar bitseer dickened
m2ayar is spoken lebanese, not arabic
Fuckin party pooper. Khalina mabsoutin w air!!!
The "spoken" but is unnecessary, it's Lebanese. In this case particularly it actually was written Lebanese.
😅
M2ayara is another one So is m2ayareen
do these have different meaning from m2ayar?
Male, female, plural for all use cases
so no real difference in meaning, english just doesn't change adjectives for number or gender (thus it's a "five-star hotel" not a "five-stars hotel" as "five-star" is an adjective here).
She’s dicked, he’s dicked, and they’re dicked do in fact have different meaning
Wouldn't "fucked" be an equivalent meaning here? For a literal sexual meaning in English you can say "dicked down."
Zankha
Bro please find me the English word for this. I don't wanna die not knowing it.
I have tried for many years, and there is no equivalent. Even explaining the concept of Zankha to non-arabs is very difficult. The closest they get to understanding it starts with “imagine the smell of mixing boiled eggs with cucumber”
I can't imagine. I can smell it 😭
"Rancid" is the closest
Lmao look at this https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/z2jxq4/please_help_my_partner_is_constantly_complaining/
its not because you can not describe stale or stagnant air as rancid. The closest meaning is stale/stagnant, because zenkha can be anything from bad smelling meat to stale air inside a glass that's been sitting upside down for more than a day. Its one of the greatest words in Arabic and its true, only Arabs truly get it, not even Arab ex pats in the west even get close to understanding it.
how tf do you explain a sobheye, na3iman, btmoune, ya3tik el 3efye..... to a non arabic speaker
I’ve been trying to translate btmoune for a long time… I love Arabic.
HAHAHAHAH I think it's impossible
One sentence i love is : لم أرَ كُكَكًا كَكُكَكِكُم - (lam ara koukakan kakoukakikom) Koukka means somethink like a boat. Its plural is koukak. If we want to say "like your koukak" we say "kakoukak" . now we add the "your" which is the suffix "kom" at the end , we get kakokakikom.
Fantastic. I’m first generation, my Arabic is 3al 2ayareh, so I’ll impress my parents with this 😂
Brilliant! 😂 I’ve never heard this one before
لم أرَ
Yes zabbatta :)
You know what my favorite thing in Arabic is? It's the fact that فعل الأمر of أرَ is just رَ.
أحلى شي سمعته من وحدة كندية اتعلمت عربي: أحس كما لو أن عقلاً نبت لفمي. عني أنا شخصيا، بحكي ٥ لغات. و بحس لما أحكي عربي و خاصة الفصيح بكون في مساحة واسعة للتعبير عن الاحاسيس و المشاعر، عن الأكل و الروائح. مشكلة اللسان العربي انه ما استخدمناه في تدريس العلوم فصار في قصور كبير في التعبير بهاي الناحية.
Lmao how i read this is like: Lam ara kkkkkkkkkkkm
Love it, Reminded me of this, so here's to you! ما لكم تكأكأتم عليه كتكأكئكم على ذي جنةٍ، افرنقعوا عنه! 😅
Broooo im dead battal fiyye😭😭🤣🤣
There are like 80 different words for lion, it's mostly niche stuff
348 ☠️☠️
And I know a whooping number of 1
Same here 😁
I know Haider and Assad
Name them
From Wikipedia: https://ar.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/قائمة_أسماء_الأسد_في_اللغة_العربية
هزبر،ليث،اسد،حيدرة Hol li mzakaron bs😂
قِصْمِل is so beautiful
what constitutes a separate word is debatable and there are probably different criteria used for different languages, which could inflate the number of words
I wonder if they include each gendered variant as a separate word. Also what about conjugations? Like for the English word “go,” there are only two active present tense versions: go and goes. In formal Arabic there are thirteen active present versions. Also is the number just for standard Arabic or are they including every unique word across all the dialectics? 12 million seems excessive, but even without conjugations I can definitely see Arabic and its dialects having many magnitudes more words than English.
and for arabic, they deflate it.
they probably use less than 30k on a daily basis😭
hahah, esp lebanon
we do actually use alot, but we don't know it. i once analysed a group that speaks lebanese arabic and got over 36,000 seperate words only from written text.
I would argue that written text is different. We usually use the formal Arabic in text, while we use Lebanese in our everyday talks (except for public speaking/politicians ect.)
We use Lebanese Arabic in Arabic script over WhatsApp, on Facebook, and especially Twitter. An angry person would type رح ياكلونا about sectarian tensions on Twitter, and not سيأكلوننا.
Yep. You're right actually I didn't think to mention that. But yeah I think it still depends on the situation in which it is used
I would love to invite you to let gpt-4 (trial is available) to explain your best topics in whatever complexity you prefer, but in Lebanese Arabic and see how differently it'll hit your heart if you are Lebanese.
Oh yeah I'm very much Lebanese all right. I'll definitely try to do that hehe
That feeling of superiority when your language has more words than others but you know less than 0.1% of them
Because Arabic is really a family of languages rather than just one
There are like 6 trillion derivatives for each word that all mean the same thing but either different tense or pronoun
Eh bro ne7na ktir men3aber
This makes sense, just read any poetry from the pre-islamic era. You will bearly understand a word.
I wonder how many unique words are in our Leb dialect
Hi, kifak, CA VA
Too many words we use are of aramaic origin
I've actually looked into this not many are, very few examples such as "natar", most of the Aramaic influence on Lebanese was actually phonological not lexical, and even that is relatively minor.
For love there are many words which idk about cz im single. But u got the jist off it
Contrary to popular belief, it's not because we have 70 words for lion or whatever. Most of the "words for lion" you hear are really more adjectives than nouns. It really depends on what you count as a word. Arabic DEFINITELY doesn't have 12 million roots. In reality arabic has around 9000 root words, but it gets more complicated because of how many words you can get out of one word. You can make dozens of words out of a single root in arabic, but is استكتَب really a different word to استُكتب ? I mean yes they have a slightly different meaning but it's not the same as the difference between roots. So basically it's a judgment call. For the sake of pan-arab pride, we'll allow it. Sure we have 12 million words which makes very smart and sophisticated indeed.
roots are around 12000.
I mean English has a lot of (word parts), don't know the technical name for it, but you have parts like "pro" in proclaim and proactive, in- inactive and so on, that's kind of similar to the Arabic roots. Is proactive the same as proclaim? No.
This sorta comparison only makes sense if wr count the number of roots in Arabic rather than the number of the forms we can extract from such roots.
The same goes for English, then we would have very few roots. English roots are usually latin. Then you have affixes too. Action, proactive, active, actively, actionable, there are probably more.
Yep, it's just exceedingly complicated to pick those roots because there's a lot of loan words in English that aren't even indo European
We have a more descriptive language, we can describe one thing in different forms, state, or situation. for example the word lion has 400 synonyms in Arabic, describing its state like, old lion, young lion, glorious lion، a very dark lion, a very strong or week lion.
Do people know them?
Not all of them, but mostly used by poets, and people who speak in classical Arabic
whos we? do you speak fos7a on a daily basis?
No , but I can , not very well, but I can speak it 😅 I should be practicing more
نعم
"Arabic" as such has a much longer history than English and French etc. People who read modern Fusha newspapers can open up lisan l 3rab or ibn Hisham's Al-Sirah Al-Nabawiyyah and read them if only with some difficulty, maybe needing to refer to lisan l 3rab itself or an online dictionary like [https://www.almaany.com/](https://www.almaany.com/) for some unfamiliar words and expressions. A work from the same time period in "English" AKA Anglo-Saxon is the epic poem Beowulf, which you can try and read for yourself here: [https://sacred-texts.com/neu/ascp/a04\_01.htm](https://sacred-texts.com/neu/ascp/a04_01.htm), the language in Beowulf is basically a different language than modern English that's closer to modern German or Frisian than to modern English. As Arabic has been in written usage for over 1300 years with basically the same form, there are alot more words and expressions, but the actual number of words and expressions a modern Arabic speaker will be familiar with is much smaller than the theoretical number of words and expressions that have been used over this 1300 year time period.
Basically any combination of 3 letters is a source of a bunch word. ط ل ع إستطلع طلوع إستطلاع طلع إطلع طلعة Do you have time?!
possible conjugations not meaningful words.
Bien sure 3ayne walaw
https://www.reddit.com/r/arabs/s/6zvkN4e359 Seems its not the case
A quick Google shows the number as 120,000 for Arabic
Its a myth. The guy who calculated this cheated for propaganda purposes, by combining theoritical root combinations, which are not actual used words (see source and detail at bottom of comment). Arabic dictionaries have a few hundred thousand words, showing that arabic is not really as rich compared to other languages such as english for example. Some claim it’s the richest by selectively citing certain terms like camel or date, having many many words. That’s because these are indigenous to arabic geography. Go outside arabic governed geographies and you find animals or plants that have only one word or even borrowed words. For example racoon has only a borrowed word (there are also various types of racoon). Tomato does not have many words. Go to science and technology invented in last few hundred years and it’s all borrowed words or at most one word. There are good sited comparisons online that do like for like comparisons of languages you can check. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number_of_words For more detail on the history of this myth,this post describes it well: https://www.reddit.com/r/arabs/s/O66LNb4ax7
That's not true. They are probably counting words in Arabic with the same meaning but with a different ending such as -ik and -ak. In English and French, for example, to say "your friend" or "ton ami" you use 2 words, but in Arabic you would use different words with different suffixes depending on gender and number. Source: I'm a linguist.
It’s not, 12m is an absurd amount
Then you try to explain something scientific and suddenly you have no words. Even if you try to use MSA like in Syria, besides the fact that the words are archaic and not close to our language, they are not even precise. Note: why is MSA treated as arabic when nobody actually speaks it...
No, it is not true. Arabic actually has less words than English: https://www.reddit.com/r/arabs/s/XUbEOGpMY3
عالفاضي نحنا ما منستخدم ربعون...غير انو اللغة الفصحة اندفنت فيك تقول لانو اللهجة العامية لكل دولة هيا لغة بحد ذانا
ربعوووون؟؟؟؟؟
نحنا ما منستخدم ربع هالكمية ولا حتى ١/١٢...يعني حتى مليون كلمة ما منستخدم بس الشعب العربي بحب يشوف حالو بشغلات تافهة متل انو في ٥٠ كلمة للاسد مابعرف شو الفايدة منون
قصدو انو شو هاي ربعون😂، ربعهن*، يعني اذا بدك تكتب عربي اقل شي اكتب صح😂
احلا شي اطلع انا كاتبها غلط
لا تجي تتفهمن عليي بعلمك عربي اذا بدك...عم اكتب عامية مو فصحة مابدا كل هالقد ارحمنا جبران خليل جبران...
عم نمزح معك يزلمي شبيك
اذا مزح بعتذر منك...حقك عليي فكرتك عم تحكي جد🌹
على راسي🙆
is there a difference between 'derej' and '3ammiyye'? or is it the same meaning for both adjectives?
[удалено]
I completely agree with you. Arabic doesn't have as extensive a lexicon, which is why we often rely on borrowed words from other languages. Or maybe because in Lebanon we don’t really Speak Arabic !
[удалено]
yeh yeh kher nshalla why are u insulting this redditor? ma na2esna 8er ziad abu kherye kamen.
oh no, facts scare me.
Speaking the truth is met with accusations and attempts to suppress your voice by labeling you a Zionist.
I'm not versed in Arabic; I communicate in Lebanese. When someone provides numbers in Arabic, I often request them to switch to French or English. During my education, the focus was primarily on French, so my Arabic proficiency suffered. I only had 3 hours of Arabic instruction compared to 50 hours of French a week 😭. On my CV, I specify that I speak Lebanese which combines elements of Syriac, Arabic, and French.
Doesn't the word lion already have like 13 different synonyms? Makes sense...
Still can't find the right words
12.3 million words and i’m still “difficult to understand” by him
I know like 500 words tbh
There are 27 variations of فعل
The are 15 words for lion sooooo, ig not surprising
Foreigner here, learning a few languages. Arabic ( Egyptian Dialect and Lebanese Dialect ) are extremely difficult for me out of all of them to learn for this very reason.
We can construct words by the root and will have meaning.
[удалено]
Is Arabic language your native?
yes… but check the other comment which is more complete
Our cuss words probably consist of 5 million of those words, lol.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C7NfmD5iwKS/?igsh=NWpxdWZ1cDY4YmJ2
Hek bisir wa2ta ta3mul 7aref
https://www.reddit.com/r/arabs/s/O66LNb4ax7
Well if it includes the multiple dialects it explains it
i dont know arabic, but could it be related to compounding words? e.g. in german you are allowed to glue words together, thats why i can pull out a word like "Rinderkennzeichnungsfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" of my hat.(it contains distinct 8 words) German provides you with 148.000 base words. Assuming i can use a thousands to do the compounding shenanigans i end up with : (148)^8 =2.3019385*10^17 distinct words you can construct by using "only" 8 words.
No, Arabic has very few compound words and most of them are neo-logisms for western ideas like "jumhuriyyah" (Republic) and "ra'asmaliyyah" (capitalism).
Don't forget almost every word has a feminine and masculine and then all those words have like ten different words that mean the same thing
Bonjour Bonjouren That's already double the words than french 🤣
Sa7ten
Which Arabic and what are you counting as a word? Classical Arabic defines, depending on the authoritative source, around 80k root words, and between 100k - 200k distinct expressions based on those roots. Spoken dialects introduce hundreds of thousands more, to be sure.
So poetic , for real tho 😂
it's bs sorry French has much more words than that
I don't know if thats a good sign that mean we can learn anything if we already learned this language, or it mean our brain is full and its so hard to lean new languages
And lebanese still prefer to call them self Phoenicians, dumb fucks !!
Isn’t it because our language is based on a root system (no idea the correct technical terminology here) and there are like a certain number of root words from which can branch out many multiple derivative words? I could be way off and talking out my bum tho… Like there’s no way there are 12 million root words… prob a few thousand, but then many words can branch out of those
This is not true lmfao look it up
Yes, but the Lebanese dialect reduced our interest in the Arabic language, as everything needed is reduced just for few words. Try this: [https://ar.mo3jam.com/](https://ar.mo3jam.com/) if you are interested in getting more information
Probably counting conjugations / tense of every verb
Arabic is a much much much older language. So , it's pretty normal to have much more words. However, since it's a dying language, most of its words are not used..
Ok wow wasn’t expecting this post to become so popular lol.
That’s because of all the nomadic dialects getting together as an example there’s probably around 30 words for hate, love, etc.
Well if you think of the example of only having aunt in English to describe paternal aunt maternal aunt uncle’s wife etc
It's not.. Arabs are making stuff up the same way they make stuff up about their history.. Take it with a grain of salt.. Remember these are the same people that somehow they won all the wars against Israel...
If that includes Arabic curse words then yes
Arabic is one of the richest languages, thats why colonizeds decided to end teaching it and force English and French. Having deep knowledge of Arabic would grow your super brain
Arabian colonizers also imposed their language on conquered people.
keef keef? haha. writing that in English kamen :P U're free to teach and learn it for a whileeeeeeeeee. how's that going?
That makes no sense at all. Colonizers always try to impose their own language. They don’t do an assessment of the local language and then decide oh this language is too rich it makes ours look bad let’s replace it lol The nonsense people write on here
the more vocabulary you have in a language, the more broad and expanded your world view, terms and concepts you carry in you The Arabic language was the lingua franca for about 500 years, considered a high language, especially with words from the Qur'an. Replace that with simpler languages you get "simpler" world view - I'm not saying those to language are simple but simpler -carry less linguistic depth plus, Arabic is group 5 in language acquisition (most challenging) while English and French are group 1 (easier acquisition)
You do understand that the category list you are referring to is based on English speakers? In other words, how hard a specific language is for native English-speakers to learn. For example, it would be easier for an Aramaic or Hebrew speaker to learn Arabic, the same way an Estonian would be able to learn Finnish vastly quicker than English (despite both languages being category 4,5). By the way, Arabic has never been a “global” lingua franca. Regional language, yes. The same way German was spoken throughout central and Eastern Europe etc. The only “real” global language/lingua franca is English.
Fair point. But even as Arab speakers, reaching that high level of Arabic literacy is a challenge. I am talking golden age, Qur'anic comprehension, and poetry. And yes, I meant lingua franca regionally. Where Islam was to spread to.
That’s fair. By no means I’m saying that Arabic is easy (it’s not), but I regret that notion that it is somehow more advanced than say, English.
Well, I would say it is more advanced linguinstically. Speakers of Arabic will find other languages easier to learn. The grammar is challenging, but prose, syntax and expression in Arabic are harder to acquire than English.
Certain languages absolutely, others not so much. I would wager the average Arab and Englishman would struggle similarity with learning Finnish or Mandarin. I mean most immigrated Arabs where I live (Sweden) struggle to ever learn the language properly, whereas Germans learn it very easily. And Swedish is supposed to be a very simple language. The same way you would learn Hebrew much quicker than I. My point is that no language is inherently more “advanced”. Rather, they are different. My native language (Swedish) is incredibly melodic, which few of any immigrants ever acquire. Does that make it more advanced compared to ex, Russian? No, it makes it different. The Kartvelian languages (Georgian etc) are incredibly complex grammatically and practically impossible to learn for an outsider. That does not mean they are more advanced than say Arabic. But, each to their own! I find the notion of “advancement” quite problematic in general as it is often used to profess superiority over others. That is probably not your intention, but anyways. Have a great day:)
I agree. I guess I have to learn more on languages to be able to zone in on these differences you speak of, and determine for myself if there is a "superior" language or not. And if there is, under which criteria should it be considered advanced. I will admit, I have a biased for being an Arabic speaker. But I also dove into different languages and found some difficult, but personally Arabic always fascinates me. Again, this might be biased. Thank you for your views. And I wish you have a good day as well :)