Category talk:Arabic language

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We currently have Judeo-Arabic, but also Judeo-Tunisian Arabic (ajt) and Judeo-Moroccan Arabic (aju). The Arabic lects they draw from are all considered separate L2s, which perhaps supports this arrangement, but I don't know how different they all actually are, and it seems worth having a discussion on this. @Wikitiki89 —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:37, 11 September 2016 (UTC)Reply

I'm actually in favor of merging all of Arabic into one language. This would work similarly to how it works with Chinese. But in the past when I brought this up, there seemed to be too much opposition to the idea. As it is stands, the spoken Judeo-Arabic dialects deserve the same treatment as other spoken Arabic dialects. Judeo-Arabic (jrb) itself, however, can be merged with Arabic (ar), because it is essentially the same language as Classical Arabic expect for the fact that it is written in the Hebrew alphabet. But because of the difference in writing system, this merger would not really bring much benefit. --WikiTiki89 23:00, 11 September 2016 (UTC)Reply

@Fay Freak mentions Judeo-Yemeni Arabic, , and seems to support merger into the topolectal codes. I really don't know what the best solution is, and I await the day when we have Arabic contributors who want to take the lead on making Chinese-style tables and maps where we can list all known dialectal forms — but in the mean time, this is a festering mess. @פֿינצטערניש, Fenakhay, M. I. Wright may be interested as well. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 18:24, 5 April 2020 (UTC)Reply

I did not notice this section; yes, I cannot oppose it. I just mentioned a priori concerns since I never specifically read or listened to Judeo-Arabic, and I thought “who could? would he even notice?”, which is why I said “The Jews might deal with it themselves”. Just on the other hand one might conclude something from the absence of information. “Pleading ignorance”, “to deny claims on the basis of lack of knowledge”. Fay Freak (talk) 18:37, 5 April 2020 (UTC)Reply

In some places, they are very different: following the qeltu/gelet division, Muslim Baghdadi Arabic is a South Mesopotamian dialect, but Jewish and Christian Baghdadi Arabic are both North Mesopotamian dialects (though also distinct from the Jewish sociolects of North Mesopotamia). But this just underlines the need for a template that can show each city or oasis or religious group in a city alongside all the others. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:58, 5 April 2020 (UTC)Reply

Agreed that Judeo-Arabic is very often considerably different from the Muslim and Christian dialects. It's also typically written in the Hebrew alphabet, and it might be best to keep it separate, for now. It should be understood that Judeo-Arabic as a heading refers to literary Arabic with Hebrew letters, and it's probably not a bad idea to point Judeo-Arabic head words to their Arabic-letter equivalents.

Should we have more active Jewish contributors from Arabic-speaking communities in the future who contribute Judeo-Arabic entries, they can and should feel free to work out among themselves how to handle the many forms of Judeo-Arabic, and we should support their decision if and when this happens. IMO.

I'm not against collapsing literary Judeo-Arabic with our main Arabic entries, as long as the entries remain. But I will say that there is a unique vocabulary to Judaism that might still warrant keeping Judeo-Arabic separate until we have more competent Judeo-Arabic contributors. פֿינצטערניש (Fintsternish), she/her (talk) 22:37, 5 April 2020 (UTC)Reply

Ok, I looked a bit into it, having quoted a bit Lambourn, Elizabeth (2018) Abraham's Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World, Cambridge University Press, →DOI, →ISBN which contains an inventory of the Cairo Geniza in one column in the original Hebrew script and in the other transcribed or transliterated into Arabic – not translated as one would translate Serbo-Croatian into Macedonian –, which makes it look like a Standard Arabic text. Similarly it is with reading some of the quotes under Category:Judeo-Arabic lemmas. The transcription is as if from Arabic, and if you only read the transcriptions you don’t know it was written in Hebrew script or an alleged other language. So presuming this is the norm for written Arabic texts in Hebrew script I can definitely support merging the literary “Judeo-Arabic” with {{spelling of}} into Arabic and adding Hebrew script to the language data of Arabic. Fay Freak (talk) 13:44, 13 August 2020 (UTC)Reply

I see Fenakhay (talk • contribs) also has concluded that Judeo-Arabic is not a real language and should be merged into Arabic. So I think I will add Hebrew script as second script of Arabic so we can slowly transform them into “Hebrew spellings of” Arabic words. Looking through all the sixty “Judeo-Arabic lemmas”, many of which with quoted full sentences, there aren’t even any peculiarities, it is just as if a Standard Arabic speaker wrote in Hebrew script because that’s what he learned to write, and this, where one would not even see that it is Judeo-Arabic if it were transcribed into Roman letters, is the kind of entries that one would continue to enter. Of course this random selection of “descendants” of “Judeo-Arabic”

   ├──── Judeo-Iraqi Arabic (yhd)
   ├──── Judeo-Moroccan Arabic (aju)
   ├──── Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic (yud)
   ├──── Judeo-Tunisian Arabic (ajt)
   └──── Judeo-Yemeni Arabic (jye)

is also completely useless for lexicographic practice, just a classificationist database monster, and has to go as soon as Judeo-Arabic is merged. Fay Freak (talk) 18:16, 4 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the ping! I must have missed this discussion somehow. Just to be clear, I am only with merging Literary “Judeo-Arabic” into Arabic. The different Jewish dialects should stay and reclassified as descendants of Arabic. Thankfully there are not that many “Judeo-Arabic” entries at the moment, so it'll be a quick merge and can be done manually.

Since Arabic is a WT:WDL language, will this affect “Judeo-Arabic” entries? — Fenakhay ^{(تكلم معاي · ما ساهمت)} 09:10, 5 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

@Fenakhay: The list of “languages well-documented on the internet” is based on modern languages. A systematic interpretation of the mentions of Arabic and Hebrew there can thus only mean that the restrictions only apply for Modern Standard Arabic and Modern Israeli Hebrew, since accounting for the timeframes of Arabic and Hebrew they are the equivalents of Middle French and Old English: Indeed it literally says Modern Standard Arabic and not just Arabic, which should be enough even for that German editor who does not believe that one can obtain additional rules by interpretation of law. So an Arabic word or sense can be included with a single example that makes clear it is not a ghost-word if it’s old enough (i.e. before the spread of printing in the Arabic world from 1800). No one takes exception that hapaxes in the Qurʾān and the Tanakh are included, and Chinese editors also have signs or senses only found once or twice in old works whether used or mentioned because why not for clarification? Ditto for the earliest Malay inscriptions, and by the way there is also Judeo-Persian, which is an orphan with us.

About the Jewish dialects I thought that Judeo-Iraqi Arabic is just Iraqi Arabic, clearly a continuum. We naturally think of Jewish terms as just Iraqi Arabic, compare عمبة, and one doesn’t get the idea of there being a particular “Judeo-Iraqi Arabic” (there are actually various in Iraq, some more Iraqi Arabic some less). Moroccan Arabic is heterogenous enough that it does not make sense to single out Judeo-Moroccan Arabic, is it? Why at the L2 header? “Judeo-Yemeni Arabic”, while sounding great, is so rare in use a term (can we attest it first-hand?) that it could be a ghost language. All of those are fabrications that you only find in Ethnologue or works bearing titles like “Encyclopedia of Linguistics”. You see what I mean? I do not deny differences of Jewish dialects, but SIL drawing a tree of all languages is no sufficient reason to split off languages but the split must naturally follow from the material, which I don’t see to motivate such split. Fay Freak (talk) 11:49, 5 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

This is a good point: we should probably explicitly revise WT:WDL to stop technically including Biblical Hebrew and earlier varieties of Chinese (etc) and to reflect the conventional interpretation that it does cover modern Latin. - -sche (discuss) 21:48, 8 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

I never followed this understanding of modern Latin, apart from the question that you cannot well define where it should start. The three-citations rule has objectives that do not apply to Latin but do apply to invented languages like Esperanto, specifically the exclusion of protologisms, for of course invention of words is an evil that works distinctly in constructed languages in comparison to Latin. The users of Latin are so rarefied, divided by their scientific fields, that one durable use must be satisfying. Imagine some writers from whichever age writing about specific things in Arabia or Mexico. Or newer biology. You would generally exclude modern vocabulary. And it also is satisfying considering the number and characters of editors interested in Latin who collect words: I reckon that Latiners that could possibly edit here are the kind of people that read something and thence add a word the form of which they are sure about with single quote but not three even if they know of more, because formatting quotes is work-intensive.

Basically Modern Latin is like Arabic or Hebrew before acquiring their modern properties, note that, therefore it cannot be treated like the modern languages, the documentations of which are threatened by interested parties. So your appeal from the contrary limps, rather you should see how it is still more aptly treated like a dead language. Speaking about the dangers by reason of which we have to have restrictions on where a word must occur, it appears that any mention up to including the Middle Ages suffices and probably beyond until we reach the point where Latin words use to be invented and listed in dictionaries rather than to be used actually, which is reached at the latest with the publication of the Lexicon recentis Latinitatis. But if any such word is used once it is a good deal. It is hard to obtain a company of three people in a room speaking Latin with each other, isn’t it? Fay Freak (talk) 01:57, 9 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

To which I summarize that "Modern Latin speakers are better than the rest of us." There's no reason to record every nonce used in Modern Latin any more than there is in Modern English. I might argue there's less reason, as Modern Latin is more likely to be in published, durably archived sources--as you say, it is hard to obtain a company of three people in a room speaking Latin with each other--whereas Modern English, and even Esperanto, is used all the time in rooms with three people talking to each other, plus online rooms and forums, meaning the three cite rule complicates sourcing words used among a community of speakers for English and Esperanto much more often then Modern Latin.--Prosfilaes (talk) 14:21, 29 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

• All merged. Judeo-Arabic is to be merged into Arabic , and converted to an etymology-only code. The other Judeo-Arabic codes are to be merged into their respective regional codes. Entries in Hebrew script will be categorised separately within the language; see Category:Judeo-Arabic. Fenakhay is executing this merger. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:49, 19 August 2021 (UTC)Reply