A Conversation for Arabic
A711208 - Arabic
Monsignore Pizzafunghi Bosselese Posted Apr 27, 2002
Just one question: WHY???
Why on Earth did you put this one into the Writing Workshop? For all I can say, it's *finished* and ready to go into the Guide. There's one thing left for me to do. I'm going to have the whole Workshop thing removed from the face of this planed.
A711208 - Arabic
Gnomon - time to move on Posted May 1, 2002
This is an excellent entry and will have no problems in Peer Review. Before you submit it, you might like to tidy it slightly:
A few headings such as "Dialects", "Features of the Language" and "Literature" will make it look much nicer. If you know how to do them in GuideML, that's great. If not, just put them on separate lines with a blank line before and after them.
It needs a footnote to say what the Kaaba is.
The following sentence is badly phrased:
"For the former, it - the 'Udhari school especially, as seen in such romances as Kalilah wa Dimnah - is said to have been the first to make romance in the strict sense (courtly love, chivalry, lots of sighs and pure devotion to unattainable beloveds) a literary trope, whence it came to Europe via Spain and the troubadours of Provence."
For a start, you can't use "former" and "latter" when referring to a list of three things. Secondly, it is just too long and a slow reader will have lost track by the time they get to "a literary trope". Finally, the word trope is not common in English, so it probably needs a footnote. Using a different word might help. It would be better to break this sentence up into two or three smaller sentences.
You're not supposed to say "I" or "me" in Edited Entries, so instead of "I shouldn't really even attempt..." say "it is difficult to even attempt...".
Some typos and grammar points:
widely spoken --> widely-spoken
Hebrew and Aramaic and Akkadian --> Hebrew, Aramaic and Akkadian
more than series --> more than a series
Well done!
A711208 - Arabic
Monsignore Pizzafunghi Bosselese Posted May 1, 2002
Hey Gnomon, please leave some comments for Peer Review! If there's nothing left to comment then the PR thread might sink down immediately
A711208 - Arabic
PseudoRandom Posted May 13, 2002
Thanks for the suggestions! Most of them I just fixed.
A711208 - Arabic
Monsignore Pizzafunghi Bosselese Posted May 13, 2002
Fine!
May I suggest you remove this thread from the NotWorkshop (see the discussion here: F47999?thread=180625) and re-post it to Peer Review? As I said before, putting a *perfect* entry to PR runs the danger of it sinking down immediately, and it'll *have to* stay there for at least a week before a Scout may pick it.
A711208 - Arabic
Researcher 188007 Posted May 28, 2002
Hi Pseudo Random,
As I said (er, on the 'Very Good' thread after the entry) I have some language-related points I'd like to make. (Don't worry, Sir Bossell, I can probably come up with one or two more for PR)
Mention Arabic is one of the six official UN languages.
Arabic isn't that closely related to Hebrew or some of the others here - Ethiopic in particular IIRC. Sorry to be picky.
(aside) Linguistics is terrible for trotting out the same old examples again. You'll find 'kataba' in any linguistic text on Arabic.
American or Continental handwriting. Explain?
You could mention how much of the poetic & rhetorical force of the Koran is lost in translation.
Arab Spain > Moorish Spain.
Hope this helps,
Jack
A711208 - Arabic
PseudoRandom Posted Jun 5, 2002
Good point about the UN languages and the Koran! And yes, kataba is way too boringly standard - but hey, it was the first thing that came to mind Saying Moorish Spain is perhaps fairer to its large non-Arab population, but in this context surely Arab Spain is more self-explanatory.
However, I'm going to have to argue with you about Hebrew and Ethiopic; my ongoing learning of Hebrew has been made vastly easier by the fact that most of the commonest words are cognate (more so, I would guess offhand, than English and German.) To take the standard example, every word in the first sentence of Genesis has an Arabic cognate:
Hebrew:
bere'shiit bara' 'eloohiim 'et hash-shamayim w'et-ha-eretz
Arabic:
bi-r-ri'asi bara'a allaahu as-samaawaati w-al-arDa
('et doesn't translate here, but 'iyyaa- is its Arabic cognate.)
I don't speak Geez, sadly, but the main current debate in classification of Semitic languages is on whether to group Arabic with South Semitic (Geez, Tigre, Tigrinya, Amharic, and the South Arabian languages such as Mehri and Soqotri) on the basis of shared grammatical features such as internal plurals, or with Northwest Semitic (Hebrew, Aramaic, etc.), so it can't be that distant. Certainly the few samples I've seen of it have been pretty easy to puzzle out using just Arabic. I mean, it even still retains two out of the three proto-Semitic cases! The Semitic languages are at least as similar to each other as, say, the Germanic languages or the Romance languages, despite the longer timescales involved.
A711208 - Arabic
FABT - new venture A815654 Angel spoiler page Posted Jun 5, 2002
Well *I* think think it's ready for peer review......
A711208 - Arabic
Researcher 188007 Posted Jun 5, 2002
I may have looked before I leapt there. I my memory I had Amharic down as a Cushitic language, which it isn't, despite the influence Oromo has had on it (I looked that bit up!)
Fair comment. The triconsonantal structure has been pretty impermeable through the centuries, and though Modern Hebrew shows European syntactic influence, the words are still similar to Arabic. In fact, words from Arabic were borrowed during Hebrew's resuscitation - case closed really. Anyway, that's all by the by - it's definitely ready for peer review.
A711208 - Arabic
PseudoRandom Posted Jun 9, 2002
um, see my comment on Dellys - how do i go about putting it up for peer review if no review button is available for the entry?
A711208 - Arabic
Gnomon - time to move on Posted Jun 10, 2002
I think you have to withdraw it from Writing Workshop first, since the entry can't be in two review forums at the same time. At the top of this page you should see the message "This is the Conversation Forum for Writing Workshop". Click on Writing Workshop. At the bottom of the page, you should see a list of entries in the Writing Workshop, with your one somewhere near the top. You should see the word "Remove" beside your entry. Click on this. Now you will be able to Submit the entry to Peer Review.
Key: Complain about this post
Writing Workshop: A711208 - Arabic
- 1: PseudoRandom (Mar 20, 2002)
- 2: Monsignore Pizzafunghi Bosselese (Apr 27, 2002)
- 3: PseudoRandom (Apr 30, 2002)
- 4: Gnomon - time to move on (May 1, 2002)
- 5: Monsignore Pizzafunghi Bosselese (May 1, 2002)
- 6: PseudoRandom (May 13, 2002)
- 7: Monsignore Pizzafunghi Bosselese (May 13, 2002)
- 8: Researcher 188007 (May 28, 2002)
- 9: PseudoRandom (Jun 5, 2002)
- 10: FABT - new venture A815654 Angel spoiler page (Jun 5, 2002)
- 11: Researcher 188007 (Jun 5, 2002)
- 12: PseudoRandom (Jun 9, 2002)
- 13: Gnomon - time to move on (Jun 10, 2002)
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