A friend explained some of the intricacies of Arabic to me the other night; I thought I’d write down the most striking aspects:<\/p>\n
* Status in the ancient Arab world was greatly influenced by your language abilities. Ancient heroes were language experts, not usually warriors or political leaders.
\n* The Koran, in fact, was especially notable due to its masterful Arabic language. The quality of the writing was what gave it authenticity.
\n* Perhaps because of this, the ancient vocabulary was much bigger than today’s.
\n* Arabic generally uses a single, unique word to express even complex subjects. It does not use prefixes or suffixes to build word, so words with similar meaning can sound very different.
\n* The written language mostly omits vowels.
\n* Objects (“table”) have gender and verbs depend on which gender the person you’re speaking about is.
\n* Plurals have a special case when there’s exactly two of something.
\n* Students generally enter university without any formal training in grammar. Most take an introduction to it just to experience how difficult it is.
\n* The meaning of a word depends on its position in the sentence and its pronunciation.
\n* Ancient writing can still be read, as the script is much the same.
\n* Poets would battle each other – just meet and try to impress each other with their command of language. One famous story tells of a poet who amazed his challenger by responding with a sentence that was a complete palindrome and still fit the conversation.
\n* When a line doesn’t work, the phrase “it won’t rhyme” means it doesn’t match one of the [traditional 13 poem templates](http:\/\/awzan.com\/bu7oor\/bu7oor1.html).
\n* Every line has to fit [that pattern](http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Arabic_prosody#A_-_The_original_fifteen).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A friend explained some of the intricacies of Arabic to me the other night; I thought I’d write down the most striking aspects: * Status in the ancient Arab world was greatly influenced by your language abilities. Ancient heroes were language experts, not usually warriors or political leaders. * The Koran, in fact, was especially…more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[372,384],"tags":[358],"class_list":["post-4578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-2","category-world","tag-tagged"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9wjHJ-1bQ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4578"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4770,"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4578\/revisions\/4770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}