Saturday, October 12, 2013

Al-Lugha al-3rabiya, mumkin, insha'allah.

Everyone in the world spoke (spake?) the same language. A number of people began to build a city and a tower to reach up to the heavens. They did this for fame and to not be scattered over the earth, though I'm not entirely clear on this second rationale. God, realizing that a people with a common language could cooperate very well, decided to spread people all over the earth and confuse them by making them speak different languages.

I'm not sure I understand exactly what the problem was with people communicating with each other. Hearing the story previously, I've understood the tower to have been hubristic and problematic, but I'm not clear on how the text supports that interpretation.

I really like languages, so I'm glad to answer this question. The language I'd most like to be able to instantly speak fluently is Arabic. Arabic, which I studied for six weeks this summer, can be very tough, but I really enjoy it. In terms of coverage, Arabic applies to an incredibly expansive region including much of Africa. That said, Arabic exists in many dialects so different that I've heard them compared as the difference in Spanish, French, and Italian--and it's true that Moroccan Arabic, at least, sounds very little like Modern Standard/Fusha Arabic.

Arabic is incredibly different from most other languages I've studied. This provides for a lot of challenge, certainly, but I think it also increases some of the value of learning it. Insofar as language shapes thought, learning to speak another language helps expand one's thinking, and the different-ness of Arabic would increase this benefit.

Arabic is one of loads of languages I'd love to be able to speak, but I do want to focus on better learning the languages I've already begun studying rather than starting lots of new languages. So instead of trying Farsi, Urdu, or Russian, all of which I think I'd like to speak, I'll try to become more competent in those languages in which I already have some ability.

It's also safe to say that I want to be able to speak most of these languages. My interest in Afrikaans is limited, and "African Traditional" is just a bunch of languages lumped together, but otherwise, it'd be great to learn these languages.

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