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To: sionnsar

Arabic has about 45,000 words, compared to our 250,000 - 300,000.

When Igor was teaching electronics to the Royal Saudi Air Force, there were no words for the electronics terms we used, so he ended up teaching electronics AND English.


1,657 posted on 03/25/2008 6:46:22 PM PDT by Monkey Face (Isn't it strange that the sun lightens our hair but darkens our skin?)
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To: Monkey Face; sionnsar

Although Arabic and other Semitic languages lack English’s richness of vocabulary, they load a great deal of meaning on to the triliteral root, the 3-consonsant combination that forms the “center” of the meaning of a large group of words.

It’s as if we read the literal meaning of every Greek, Latin, Germanic and Indian root element into every English word. It doesn’t expand the vocabulary in terms of numbers of words, but it loads the meanings and increases the flexibility of the more limited vocabulary.


1,659 posted on 03/25/2008 7:13:51 PM PDT by Tax-chick ("Everything is either willed or permitted by God, and nothing can hurt me." Bl. Charles de Foucauld)
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