SOME DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ENGLISH AND ARABIC

An assignment written for English guided by

Rina W. Setyaningrum, M. Ed Introduction to Linguistic

Written By :

Maisyatul Hasanah NIM. 201010100311270

English Department Faculty of Training Teacher and Education University of Muhammadiyah Malang East Java Indonesia 2011

INTRODUCTION
Linguistics is the science of language, requiring and precipitating the study of human and animal languages and speech with their origins. As the purpose of language is to communicate, any study of communication is a study in linguistics by nature whether so asserted or not. The written word, speech, Braille, sign language or the barks of a dog are all parts of the infinite study of Linguistics.

In this paper, I would like to compare English with Arabic. Both of them has a different pronounciation and grammatical function. In Arabic there are a lot of symbol that can give some meaning in sentence structure which has influence each other. It has unique symbol and different pronunciation with English. Arabic is a language vastly different from English, and this can make learning it quite challenging. This case related to Linguistics because linguistics is science that is tied in so many ways to so many other areas of study.

I realize that Linguistics inherently also a developer of several talents. These talents include the use and discipline of personal logic, analytical and critical thought as well as skills of organized debate. Thats way I study Linguistics and try to show that Linguistics may also help us if I learn about a foreign language. Linguistics can help us make and keep peace between us and many other peoples by showing how a word in our language means something else altogether in theirs. And it can help us to realize that someone who seems to talk funny actually speaks quite intelegently, in their own tongue, and not funny at all.

Main Research
A. Definition of Arabic Arabic is from the Semitic language family, hence its grammar is very different from English. The Arabic script is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 basic letters. Because all letters usually stand for consonants, it is classified as an abjad. The script was first used to write texts in Arabic, most notably the Qurn. Modern dictionaries and other reference books is used :

y w h n m l k q f s z r d t b a B. Definition of English English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. C. Some Differences 1. Grammar Arabic has some extreme differences from English in this area (even more than other languages). In English, our sentences follow the SUBJECT + VERB + OBJECT pattern.

Example : Rudi

read

the book object pattern

Subject verb

Many other languages, both related and unrelated to English, have the same structure. Arabic, however, follows a VERB + SUBJECT + OBJECT structure, which is almost certain to cause confusion.

Example :

Verb + Subject + object pattern

English Meaning : Muhammad wrote a short letter

And to make it doubly confusing, an Arabic sentence does not need a verb (while in English that is the single most important part of the sentence). Arabic grammar has two categories: morphology and syntax. Morphology studies the forms of words and their transformations to intended meanings. Syntax studies the case endings of words and their positions in the sentence. An Arabic sentence consists of words. The word be a particle, a noun, or verb. Case ending in Arabic will show in three examples below :

First Example :

Transliteration: ha.dara muhammadun

English meaning: Muhammad came (or Muhammad (has) come).

Dictionary: <.ha.dara> [ ]: came, <muhammadun> [ ] : Muhammad.

Second Example :

Transliteration: ha.dartu muhammadan

English meaning: I brought Muhammad (or I (have) brought Muhammad).

Dictionary: <.'a.h.dartu > [ ]: I brought, <muhammadan> [ ] : Muhammad

Third Example :

Transliteration: ha.dartu maa muhammadin

English meaning: I came with Muhammad

 Dictionary: <.ha.dartu> [ ]: I came, <ma`a> [] : with, <muhammadin> [ ] : Muhammad

The noun <Muhammad> [ ]has appeared with three different endings. These situations are named as follows: Regularity (nominative) as in <muhammadun> [ ] Opening as in <muhammadan> [ ]

Reduction (genitive) as in <muhammadin> [ ]

The end-markers of the words are called short vowels or diacritics. There are rules for placing markers on nouns and verbs. These rules depend on the role of the noun (subject, object, reduced,etc), the tense of the verb (past, present, ..) verbs do not get the reduction end-marker -, the particle used, etc. It is common that end-markers which do not change the shape of the words by adding or deleting letters are not explicitly drawn.

2. Pronounciation

Arabic has a number of sounds that don't occur in English. A lot of these are the glottal sounds that English speakers often mock for sounding like throat clearing. These are real sounds, however, represented by letters in the alphabet. And they will be challenging to pronounce at first, probably giving a stutter. Keep in mind that the p and v sounds are not found in Arabic. English has about three times as many vowel sounds as Arabic, so it is inevitable that beginning learners will fail to distinguish between some of the words they hear, such as ship / sheep

or bad / bed, and will have difficulties saying such words correctly. Phonetics differences between English and Arabic are :

a. Sound Combination

The sound combinations found in Arabic are also quite different from those found in English. Even though Arabic is a consonant-heavy language, English uses many more consonant clusters to form words. Consonant clusters refer to phoneme groupings, not alphabet letters. Some two-consonant clusters are found at the beginning of Arabic words, but Arabic does not have any initial three-consonant clusters. English also has numerous three- and four-consonant clusters found at the ends of words, whereas Arabic does not. To compensate for this difference, Arabic speakers often insert a short vowel sound to break up consonant clusters when speaking English. For example, they might say nexist instead of "next."

b. Word Stress Word stress is very regular in Arabic. In English, word stress changes frequently and can alter the meaning and lexical category of a word. For example, object is a verb but ob'-ject is a noun. In Arabic, a change in stress is never used to change the meaning of a word. Instead, a word is pronounced with a different short vowel even when it is spelled the same. Because of the irregularity of stress in English, Arabic speakers often have a hard time learning and understanding the differences in English words. c. Sound Elision

The elision of sounds is a common phonetic feature of English that is not found in Arabic. Elision is the dropping of a sound in the middle of a word, or between words, when verbalizing a sentence or phrase. This often occurs with initial or final word vowels, or sometimes with entire syllables. Some examples of elision are capn instead of captain and wanna instead of want to. In Arabic, spelling is much more closely related to sounds, and because of this, sounds are rarely omitted.

Conclusion
From this paper we can know that if we want to generate Arabic text an Arabic Grammar is needed. Although there are similarities between different languages like English. In Arabic there are a lot of symbol that can give some meaning in sentence structure which has influence each other. There are some differences between English and Arabic even from the grammatical structure and from the phonetics distinction such as : sound combination, word stress, and sound elision.

There is a large potential for errors of interference when Arab learners produce written or spoken English. Arabic has a three consonant root as its basis. All words (parts of speech) are formed by combining the three-root consonants with fixed vowel patterns and, sometimes, an affix. Arab learners may be confused by the lack of patterns in English that would allow them to distinguish nouns from verbs or adjectives, etc.

Of course, the differences between Arabic and English don't end here. We need some exploration to have a detail information about this distinction.

References
Yule, George.1999. The Study of Language. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. Second Edition. Newman, Daniel. 2009. Arabic-English Tematic Lexicon. Property Right of Routledge. London : Francis Group. Fourth Edition. Boxer, Diana. Cohen, Andrew D. 2008. Studying Speaking To Inform Second Language Learning. Property Right of Multilingual Matters. Cambridge : Elanglab http://digilib.unsri.ac.id/jurnal/computer-science/arabic-character-recognition-usingstructural-approach-/mrdetail/1344/ http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26281/is-there-a-known-reason-that-englishhas-so-many-short-words http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definiton of English

http://st-takla.org/Learn_Languages/01_Learn_Arabic-ta3leem-3araby/Learn-Arabic_01Alphabet_El-Abgadeya.html http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5564

www.learnamazingarabic.com.