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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Now that we've gone off topic, I have a question for Muslim poster, who wrote:

[b]She had no idea about sura Ash Shurra and the verse that addressed men AND women on how to resolve (political) matters that required collective opinions. She could not read Arabic so she had no idea the language used in that verse was plural, addressing women too. [/b]

I don't see how the plural used shows definitively that both men and women were being addressed.  In Arabic, the same plural is used when it is men only being addressed or men and women being addressed.  I don't know what grounds one would use to say one or other was meant.  All that we know is that women only were not being addressed as that is a different plural.[/quote]

So it's like French and Spanish, if only in the sense that you use the masculine plural for a group that could either consist of both men and women, or just more than one men.  [/quote]

Yes, except it is not just nouns and adjectives but also verbs that have masculine and feminine plurals, with the masculine plural being used where there is at least one man or masculine item.  I didn't look up the passage Muslim PP referred to but it likely uses a masculine plural noun and verb.

There is also a dual in Arabic for referring to two people or things.  There is a masculine dual and a feminine dual for nouns, adjectives and verbs, with the former used where a male and a female or a masculine and a feminine item are the subjects.[/quote]

Really interesting. Is there a neuter case/declension?[/quote]

No neuter.

There are three cases:  nominative, accusative, and genitive.  These are conveyed through markings above the last letter of the word, except that in certain instances if the word is accusative an extra long "a" is added at the end of the word.  Typically, the markings would not be shown in handwriting or newspapers, so case markings are not as helpful as one think they could be for the struggling reader.

Most native and educated speakers of Arabic would intuitively know the proper case endings.  However, in translating medieval Arabic texts it is not always so obvious, particularly as Arabic has no punctuation; sentences are strung together by the insertion of "and" so a text is essentially one, long run on sentence.  For technical texts sometimes the markings are used.  For example, I can't imagine reading Wittengenstein in Arabic without case endings.

In the standard Quran used today all case and vowel markings are shown.  
[/quote]

Thanks! DS is taking Arabic mainly because he likes languages. But he's in month 2 of Arabic, so there's no way he could have helped me with this.[/quote]

Good luck to DS.  By the way, was writing too quickly and made a technical error above.  The marking for the genitive case appears below (rather than above) the last letter of the word.

In many ways, Arabic is one of the most logical languages out there and properly spoken sounds beautiful--the Arabic word for barbarian means one who does not know poetry.  There are cases, but they are no where near the difficulty of what one sees in Latin; if you have subject, direct object, and indirect object down cold the cases are pretty easy.

The difficulty in my view comes from the fact that written Arabic is quite different from spoken Arabic (of whatever dialect).  So unlike Spanish and French, for example, where one gets huge re-enforcement of spoken language through reading and writing and vice versa, in Arabic the payoff can be quite small.

Learning both spoken and written Arabic is like learning two different, although very similar, languages at the same time.  One can think of the difference as something akin to the difference between spoken Italian and Latin at the time of Dante (although there is no written language for colloquial Arabic).

I speak colloquial Arabic (badly) but I was formally taught Arabic purely in written form, much as Latin is often taught.  One might recite texts but was not expected to converse in the language.

Not a problem yet for your DS, but as one progresses along the vocabulary can be quite overwhelming depending on how old the texts one reads.  The golden age of Arabic literature was in the medieval centuries and the vocabulary changes considerably from century to century.  [/quote]

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