TAC eskandar (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu)

[Bubulus]

You may try this for MSA. The author constantly works on its improvement.
http://www.livingarabic.com/arabic-dictionary.php

Thanks, what a great resource! I put in يتيح to see how it did, and it gave me exactly the information it had taken forever to dig up between Hans Wehr and web searches. Marvelous!!

Entries have verbal nouns!!

[voron]

Thanks, what a great resource!

Güle güle kullan.

[eskandar]

Teşekkürler!

EDIT: This Urfalı guy from my last link is so epic that I want to transcribe that video.

- Bayanlara haksızlık yapıyor musunuz?
- Yok canım, hiç olur mu, bayanlar güldür ma çiçektir.
- Bunlar sözlerde geçiyor genelde, uygulanıyor mu?
- Yok, yok, uygulanmaz.
- Siz şimdi yılda eşine kaç kere çiçek alıyorsunuz?
- İnan et eşime yıldaaa... ben hiç götürmemişim. Şimdi yalan yok.
- Nerde burda eşitlik, nerde burda kadına değer?
- Şimdi abla eşitlik... Biz işte çalışıyoruz, o tarafa bu tarafa, hiç çiçek düşünek hakikatimize gelmiyor.
- Hatırlamak için neler yapıyorsunuz?
- Ha hatırlamak için gittik mi, eve gittik mi yani elimizde ne oldu mu onu verek. Cebimizdeki para hepsini onlara verek. Zaten paramız evde kalıyor. Kendine alsınlar.

I might as well use this as an opportunity to practice! So I'm gonna try to translate this dialogue and note my vocab. Let me know what I get wrong!

-Don't you act wrongly with women?
-No my dear, not at all, don't make women happy, they are a flower [I'm sure the ma is doing something I'm not getting here.]
-These things are said in general, but are they put into practice?
-No, no, they aren't put into practice.
-How many times a year do you get flowers for your wife, now?
-Believe me, for my wife in a year... I haven't brought her anything. Now that's no lie.
-Where is this here equality, where is this here woman already?
-Now, sister, equality... Look, we work, here and there, no flowers even enter our reality.
-What all do you do to remember?
-Yeah, is it time to remember [can't even try the next sentence] All of the money that's in our pocket [is given?] to them. In fact, our money stays at home. Take it for yourself

New vocab
güldürmek - to make someone laugh, make someone happy
uygulanmak - to put into practice
eş - spouse
almak - to take, to get
inan - faith, belief
yalan - lie, untrue
eşitlik - equality
çalışmak - to work
düşünek, verek - ??? [the -ek must be some grammatical thing I haven't learned]
hatırlamak - to remember
hepsi - all (of them, it)
zaten - anyway; in fact

[voron]

Isn't the guy epic? And what he says is so true (about bringing money home instead of flowers); I would guess that if he brought his wife a flower, she would be the first one to hit him with a broomstick for the waste of money.

- Yok canım, hiç olur mu, bayanlar güldür ma çiçektir.
-No my dear, not at all, don't make women happy, they are a flower [I'm sure the ma is doing something I'm not getting here.]

Gül is a rose. "Ma" is simply "but". So what he is saying is something like "Women are roses, no? They are flowers".

- Bunlar sözlerde geçiyor genelde, uygulanıyor mu?
-These things are said in general, but are they put into practice?
- Yok, yok, uygulanmaz.
-No, no, they aren't put into practice.

Your translation is correct, it's the guys answer that is a bit off here. I think he interpreted her question along the lines of "do you apply violence" (şiddet uygulanıyor is a very common expression), that's why he answered negatively.

- Nerde burda eşitlik, nerde burda kadına değer?
-Where is this here equality, where is this here woman already?

Değer is value, and it requires dative of the preceding word. "Where is the appreciation of women here?"

- Ha hatırlamak için gittik mi, eve gittik mi yani elimizde ne oldu mu onu verek. Cebimizdeki para hepsini onlara verek. Zaten paramız evde kalıyor. Kendine alsınlar.

Gittik mi:
Paste tense + mi is a colloquial way of expressing the "when" relative clause (actually very useful and easier to use than the standard -ınca or -dığında suffixes).
Eve gittik mi - when we go home

Ne oldu mu:
Here the past tense serves a different purpose: when used with "ne", it gives it a generalizing meaning "whatever". This use is colloquial, too (the standard would be "elimizde ne varsa" or "elimizde ne olduysa").
Elimizde ne oldu mu - whatever is in our hands, whatever has come to our hands

The -ek suffix:
I think I made a mistake here (sorry!). -ak/-ek is very widely used in colloquial language instead of '-alım/-elim':
Eve gidek mi (standard: eve gidelim mi) - shall we go home?

But here the suffix is different and the meaning is different. I think it should be spelt "verik" or something, and it's just a colloquial form of 1p.pl. aorist (instead of the standard veririz). It's similar to how Azerbaijani forms its present tense.

Alsınlar:
It is the 3rd person plural optative: let them buy.

So the whole sentence translates to:
Now*, to remember, when we go, that is, when we go home, whatever there is in our hands we give it. We give all the money which is in our pocket. Our money stays at home this way. Let them buy to themselves.

*"Ha" introduces a new thought, so I've translated it with the English "now".

[eskandar]

Değer is value, and it requires dative of the preceding word. "Where is the appreciation of women here?"

Ahhh, I didn't know this word so I just assumed it was a regional variant of diğer! Thanks for the grammatical explanations, much appreciated.

[Bubulus]

You may try this for MSA. The author constantly works on its improvement.
http://www.livingarabic.com/arabic-dictionary.php

Thanks, what a great resource! I put in يتيح to see how it did, and it gave me exactly the information it had taken forever to dig up between Hans Wehr and web searches. Marvelous!!

Entries have verbal nouns!!

Website overhauled; new page:

http://www.livingarabic.com/dictionaries.html

[voron]

Website overhauled; new page:

Yeah, and it seems like the guy is going to create phone apps as well, but so far there are just placeholders:
http://www.livingarabic.com/apps.html#

[eskandar]

I've been all over the place with languages this year. I did not anticipate putting so much effort into Turkish (which was not even on my list initially), but I developed a major bug for it and haven't been able to resist. I did nothing with Italian though I just bought a bilingual facing-translation book of Italian short stories, so maybe I'll still get to it. Did almost nothing with core languages of French, Persian, and Urdu (it's time to get to the latter two), though I'm glad I spent some time on Arabic and will continue to do so. Now I'm reading some Persian essays and remembering that, however strong I might be in the language, I won't be satisfied until I don't have to look up words like "cicada" !

New vocab
خیط kheyt - thread, string
ورشکست varshekast - bankrupt
جارحه jaarehe - pl. جوارح javaareh - limb
سرایت seraayat - contagion
عون own - pl. اعوان a'vaan - help
زنجره zanjare - cicada
عظیم الجثه azimoljosse - huge, enormous

[vijayjohn]

I think I'm finding something similar with Malayalam. I honestly think I just don't get to listen to it enough (perhaps in part because I don't watch a lot of movies or TV shows in any language...). There's a word in Malayalam that means 'to rub' that I didn't learn until just yesterday. There are probably still a bunch of words that my brother knows and I don't, or at least that he knows more intuitively than I do, even though he can barely read Malayalam, the only people he's ever lived with who spoke Malayalam are my parents, and he left for grad school so many years ago.

[eskandar]

I feel you! If I were into TV my Persian would be all the better for it, but it just feels like such a waste of time, I can't bring myself to do it. And yeah it's crazy how many basic-seeming words there are in any language that you can seemingly go decades without encountering...

[eskandar]

There's already a translation, but I thought I'd try to transcribe the woman's speech at the end of this video. There's just one word I can't figure out, and then when she starts speaking faster there's a couple words I can't make out at all...

https://youtu.be/2G3C_djpF8M?t=3m53s

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم، الحمد لله الكريم المنان، الذي أكرمنا بالقرآن، وجعله ربيعاً لقلوب اهل البصائر والعرفان، والصلاة والسلام علی من حث علی تعلمه و تعليمه والتفكير فيه وتفهيمه سيدنا محمد وعلی آله واصحابه وسلم تسليما. بالنسبة لقراءة خديجة برهون فهي قراءة سليمة من حیث القواعد و مخارج ايضا، مخارج الحروف سليمة، بالاضافة الی اداء طيب وصوت جميل، فـ... فقط اريد ان اشير الی (؟؟؟) وهي موجودة في كتب التاريخ، انّ الآباء كان حين ______ النساء ____ للزواج، كان يرسل معها القرآن والموطأ، وهذا يظهر، يعني، عناية المغرب هذا البلد الكريم بالقرآن وباهله. اسأل الله سبحانه وتعلی ان يزيدك من فضله وان ينورك بهذا القرآن الرباني، والسلام عليكم ورحمة الله.

[voron]

I thought I'd try to transcribe the woman's speech at the end of this video

I know almost every word from your transcription but I would never ever be able to transcribe it myself. Which means... I should listen more, right?

فقط اريد ان اشير الی (؟؟؟) وهي موجودة في كتب التاريخ

I think she says لَها ... (... to it) but I can't really hear the word before "laha". I hear something like ّمُصِم

انّ الآباء كان حين ______ النساء ____ للزواج

The second blank is جاهزة, the first one - no idea.

[eskandar]

I know almost every word from your transcription but I would never ever be able to transcribe it myself. Which means... I should listen more, right?

Fortunately there's no shortage of media (especially news and religious stuff) in MSA to listen to...

I think she says لَها ... (... to it) but I can't really hear the word before "laha". I hear something like ّمُصِم

The second blank is جاهزة, the first one - no idea.

Nice! I still can't figure out what those other parts are, though.

[voron]

Fortunately there's no shortage of media (especially news and religious stuff) in MSA to listen to...

And films!

I want to watch the film The Message (I watched it in Turkish), and also this series Omar.

[eskandar]

Website overhauled; new page:

Yeah, and it seems like the guy is going to create phone apps as well, but so far there are just placeholders:
http://www.livingarabic.com/apps.html#

The apps for Android and iOS have launched and they're $1.99. I'd consider buying the app but I wonder what advantages it has over what's already available for free on the website.

[eskandar]

I wish I had something to do drills of Arabic verb conjugation, especially for weak/hollow verbs, in all the different forms. I was totally stuck on understanding this short phrase نبيد الظلم because I haven't drilled all of these forms completely into my head. As little faith as I have in Google Translate, it's actually been really helpful--and accurate--for short phrases and sentences in Arabic. After looking up the verb (باد - يبيد) in Hans Wehr and the Lughatuna dictionaries, they both gave the same definition: to perish, to pass away (obviously intransitive). So "we pass away oppression" doesn't make any sense without a preposition or something. But Google Translate gave the (correct) translation: "we destroy oppression". How can that be? Finally at long last it dawned on me: it's a form IV verb (nubiidu) not a form I (nabiidu). The worst part is that it's from a fully vocalized poem, so I had the vowels to begin with.

Then I couldn't find أنين in Hans Wehr no matter what I searched. Lughatuna gave the root as ءن‌ن which looked suspect to me, and I found no such root in HW. What an impossible language

Latest vocab

Persian
رعیت peasant, subject
غاصب usurper

Arabic
ربوع living quarters, residence
في ربوع in all parts of; in the midst of
باد - يَبيد to perish, to pass away
أباد - يُببد to destroy
أنين wail, moan, groan

[voron]

After looking up the verb (باد - يبيد) in Hans Wehr and the Lughatuna dictionaries, they both gave the same definition: to perish, to pass away (obviously intransitive).

There's one more tool I've been using and it has been helpful: http://aratools.com/

For any input without diacritics it outputs any possible vocalization and translation, and I haven't yet seen a case when it would fail. Just open the "Word" tab and enter the word.

For نبيد it gives:
نَبِيد we perish;disappear
نُبِيد we exterminate

For أنين it gives:
أَنَيْنَ they mature;approach
أَنِين moaning;sighing

Yeah it's a bit of a fuss as you had said that you have to use multiple tools to get all the info you need (besides Lughatuna and Aratools, I also use verb conjugators)...

[eskandar]

There's one more tool I've been using and it has been helpful: http://aratools.com/

Thanks voron, this looks very helpful indeed. I should really just be working my way through readers that have glossaries rather than tackling native texts at this stage, but this way is so much more fun, albeit exponentially more difficult.

[vijayjohn]

I should really just be working my way through readers that have glossaries rather than tackling native texts at this stage, but this way is so much more fun, albeit exponentially more difficult.

Eh, most languages don't have readers like that anyway. (Malayalam certainly doesn't!). The first thing I started with when trying to learn a Papuan language called Oirata was the creation myth, because that's all I had to start out with. (And not even the entire myth! Basically all I know is the Earth was in darkness, then the Magpie got the Eagle to allow for seven days of light before the Earth went dark again).

[eskandar]

Eh, most languages don't have readers like that anyway. (Malayalam certainly doesn't!)

You're right, but that's part of the reason I feel like I should be using such resources - there's a wealth of them available for Arabic, so why am I not taking advantage of them? (Maybe you should write the first guided reader for Malayalam!)