[ExI] Arabs don't read

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 10:25 AM, justin corwin <outlawpoet at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Not that they don't have problems, but this is a little misleading. While
> numbers of books in Modern Standard Arabic is quite low, some complicating
> factors are low literacy in Arabic due to school policies that privilege
> fluency in "foreign" languages,
>

There may be a number of reasons for it but it doesn't change the fact that
if you're interested in the pursuit of knowledge there has been no reason
to bother to learn Arabic for centuries unless your area of interest is
Arab culture itself. There was a brief moment in time when Arabic was the
worldwide language of higher learning, but that ended about 800 years ago.


> Similarly this ignores Arabic-descended languages in other Muslim
> countries like Persian and Turkish
>

No, Persian and Turkish are unrelated to Arabic. Persian is a Indo-European
language as are are the languages of India (except for the southern third)
and Latin and Greek and all of the languages of Europe except for Hungarian
Finnish Basque and Estonian.  Arabic is not a Indo-European language, it is
a Semitic language and is closely related to Hebrew. Turkish is not
Indo-European or Semitic, it is a member of the Oghuz language group.

  John K Clark
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