TIL. That's cool

I wouldn't hold the French influence against them tbf

institutes dedicated to maintaining and standardising the language as part of the Arab League (ALECSO and its subsidiaries, etc)

With successes like Arabic, French, Korean and Turkish I don't understand how the "Descriptivism vs. Prescriptivism" debate in the anglosphere is "Descriptivism : signature look of superiority", especially since their linguistic rules are filled with more exceptions than rules, and their spelling is atrocious (although I blame the Latin roots for that, since germanic languages manage just fine)

You know it's bad when you can't tell whether the words they're saying are Arabic or French.

Still can't watch a movie that old without subtitles. Gotcha

I feel like 15th and 17th century German isn't that hard??

Like yeah, archaic words here and there. Lack of standardized grammar so you have to pronounce some words first.

Still, I can understand most of what Walther von der Vogelweide wrote in the 12th/13th century without too much difficulty. I think it'd take me a month to read fluently.

"Whatever letter you don't know is I"

Chinese speaker here: No, we are not. Classical Chinese is a very different language but generally the basics are taught in school. It definitely takes significant effort because the grammar and vocabulary are completely different.

Written Chinese was reformed in the beginning of 20^th^ century to be closer to the spoken language.

Before that, it would have been true except written language was so distant from spoken, I would call them almost different languages (but that's because I'm no linguist, and someone here already told me that writing is not a language at all anyway), so the only literate people were able to read literature of the old

Yeah that's apparently a thing. Same principle too, except with logograms rather than an abjad.

That would make sense. It's one of those "languages" that really might be more of a language family, like "Chinese".

"Arabic" is not really a single language. it's regarded as such because of the pan-arabic movement but you can find many instances in which speakers of two Arabic "dialects" can barely understand each other. realistically treating Arabic as one language and all Arab languages as dialects is like treating latin languages as one and portuguese, spanish, italian and french as dialects.

however Arab countries found a way to agree on a common language, mostly to be used in media. this would be the closest to language used in the Quran, and the language used by the gulf countries. this isn't really a language any of them use as is but it is a good way to ensure they have a common way to understand each other. this is similar to western countries teaching Latin, only on a wider scale, and technically the language isn't dead because it is used in media like newspapers or some TV programming (although most tv programming would still use the local language)

so while each of these languages are evolving (in different directions even) they can still largely read and understand old books because they're taught as part of literacy. this is essentially the "formal language" which is different from the language people would use while speaking or texting for example.

that's what happens when you go all-in on scripture. the Quran, and I'm paraphrasing here, states that one should never paraphrase the Quran, because when it comes to the holy word you either say it exactly or not at all.

so resisting linguistic change is pretty damn important for Muslims. Arabic is deliberately weighed down by its own importance in the culture

sucks for them tbh!
laughs in the belief that scriptures are blasphemy