Post by Athel Cornish-BowdenPost by Peter T. DanielsPost by Daud DedenArabic & Hebrew are different houses in the same hood, when other
languages are compared they are very close.
They are structurally close (not so close as e.g. Hebrew and Aramaic),
but they aren't by any stretch of the imagination mutually comprehensible;
Remember Lee Sau Dan (or was he only in sci.lang), who said he could get
the gist of a Japanese newspaper article by just looking at the characters
but could not grasp the details of the content.
Post by Athel Cornish-BowdenCan Arabic speakers identify the topic Hebrew speakers are discussing,
without understanding any details, or are they too far apart from that?
It seems unlikely, because Hebrew has had enough sound changes that the
consonant system is rather different. OTOH, it's said that Finns understand
Estonian better than vice versa, because Finnish has changed more so that
Estonian seems to "preserve earlier forms."
But the shapes of words are different because stress patterns are different,
and of course the two languages have borrowed from different sources so
vocabulary will differ more than just in inherited lexical items (as in
e.g. Heb. _harag_ vs. Aram./Arab. _qatal_ 'kill').
Post by Athel Cornish-BowdenI have a Maltese friend who can tell what the Tunisian and Libyan
students in her department are talking about (sometimes things they
wouldn't want her to know they were discussing), but can't follow their
conversations in detail. I suspect that they know nothing about Malta
and have no idea that Maltese is related to Tunisian Arabic.
Until 1810, it was assumed that Maltese was a living relic of Phoenician
(Punic) (mostly because no one could read the few remnants of Phoenician
that had been discovered, before 1764), but then Wilhelm Gesenius (1786-
1842) -- yes, the fellow for whom the standard grammar and dictionary
are still named -- showed that Maltese was Arabic and not Phoenician. It
seems to have been his first publication.
Versuch ueber die maltesische Sprache zur Beurtheilung der neulich
wiederhohlten Behauptung dass sie ein Ueberrest der altpunische sey,
und als Beytrag zur arabischen Dialektologie (Leipzig: Vogel, 1810)
Cf. Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, R
éflexions sur quelques monuments
Phéniciens, et sur les Alphabets qui en résultent. Mémoires de
l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres 30 (1764), 405-26.
Post by Athel Cornish-BowdenPost by Peter T. Danielsand when Chomsky was studying Arabic there was no thought of seriously
studying what were called the "dialects" of Arabic (i.e. the vernacular
Arabic languages).
Last weekend I heard an anecdote of Yona Sabar, a linguist at UCLA
(presumably retired now; I haven't seen him in quite a while), a native
speaker of the Aramaic of Zakho. The speaker played for him a tape of
the Aramaic of a nearby town just over a border, and he said, "That's
not Aramaic, that must be Kurdish!" -- showing how far apart neighboring
varieties of the "same" language have grown over a few hundred years.
Another Aramaicist-linguist friend of mine has mentioned that there is
more variety within the sub-sub-family North East Neo-Aramaic (NENA)
than among all the vernacular/colloquieal varieties of Arabic.
English's closest relative is said to be Frisian. They are not mutually
comprehensible, which is the closest linguistics comes to calling two
varieties "different languages" (because "a language" is a political,
not a linguistic, concept).