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

[Hamed Al-Suhli]

Dear John,

This concept is still on the table, so let's not drift into sub-issue and
concentrate on what important to make the movement.
tomorrow I'll install wordpress and mailing list on e3rab.com, unless
someone has better idea.

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 6:08 PM, John F. Sowa <sowa at bestweb.net> wrote:

> 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
>
>


-- 
Hamed Al-Suhli
http://e3rab.com
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