Broken plurals and crazy agreement

[supergee]

Language geek appreciates Arabic.

Thanx to Making Light.

Comments

[necturus]

Re: texts from a thousand years ago being accessible: the grammar is pretty much the same, but the vocabulary can be very challenging. There is a lot of word re-use, to the point where if you don't know in advance that you're reading a philosophical text and not a work on medicine, law, or theology, you can get very confused. The same words are used in different fields with entirely different meanings.

And if you want to read a work on mathematics, be prepared to find everything written out in words -- there are no mathematical symbols -- and numbers will be expressed not in Indian or "Arabic" numerals but in the old Semitic system called "abjad" where each letter of the alphabet takes on a numerical value and you add the values of each letter in a cluster to find the value of the whole.

Oh, and it's only broken plurals that are treated as feminine singular -- at least in classical Arabic.