[Corpora-List] Fwd: Proposal for initiating a global non continentalArabic Language Academy

[John F. Sowa]

The development of a modern standard Arabic has many parallels with
the standard versions of other languages.  It's also significant
to note the very strong influence of the religious languages in
shaping most of the modern standards.  And it also raises some
interesting issues for corpus linguistics.

Just some brief reminders:

  1. The role of the King James Bible and Shakespeare as the
     foundation for early modern English.  Quotations from both
     of them are still commonly used in speech and writing,
     and people often drop archaic features into their language
     (e.g. "holier than thou" or "more scientific than thou").

  2. The role of Luther's translation of the Bible as a major
     influence on modern standard German.

  3. The role of Old Church Slavonic (a version of old Bulgarian)
     on Russian.  Many words from OCS were borrowed into Russian,
     and many phrases are widely quoted.

  4. The role of Classical and New Testament Greek in the effort
     to define a "purified" language (Katharevousa), which was not
     adopted by the majority of the population, but which did have
     a significant influence on the popular language (Dimotiki).

  5. The differences between modern Israeli Hebrew and quotations
     from Biblical Hebrew.

  6. The strong influence of Latin on all the languages of western
     Europe -- a large part of the modern international vocabulary
     and many phrases (et cetera, a priori, pro bono, ex officio).

For computational linguistics, it's important to have some way
of recognizing when a speaker or author is switching into or
quoting something from a different language or dialect.  The
problem becomes more difficult when the two dialects are
minor variants of one another.

John Sowa


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