Are stress timed languages such as Russian and European Portuguese better suited to the Arabic alphabet?
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1 Expert Answer
Rubens W. answered • 06/26/24
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Native Brazilian Portuguese Tutor - Master Conversations and more
Hi there,
The suitability of a language to a specific alphabet depends on various linguistic and historical factors rather than just its stress patterns. Stress-timed languages like Russian and European Portuguese have rhythmic patterns where stressed syllables occur at regular intervals, but this doesn't necessarily make them inherently better suited to the Arabic alphabet.
The Arabic alphabet is an abjad, which primarily represents consonants, and it has historically been adapted to a variety of languages, such as Persian and Urdu, which have different phonological structures from Arabic. Adapting it to stress-timed languages like Russian or European Portuguese would require significant modifications to represent their full phonetic inventories, including vowels.
In contrast, the Latin alphabet, which is used for both Russian (in some transliteration systems) and Portuguese, effectively represents the phonemic distinctions in these languages, including vowels and consonants. This makes it a practical choice for their written forms.
If you have more questions about languages, alphabets, or want to learn more about Portuguese, feel free to reach out. I'm here to help!
Best regards,
Rubens
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Marcia S.
Better than what? Let us see if I understood your question. The Portuguese alphabet uses Latin letters and the Russian alphabet uses Cyrillic letters. Arabic writing system is technically not an alphabet, but an Abjad. Abjads are scripts that have letters only for consonants. Modern Arabic is considered an 'impure abjad' because it indicates some of the vowels using diacritics. Back to your question. Portuguese and Russian scripts are considered alphabets because both vowels and consonants have the same weight, using full letters. Alphabets work well considering that Portuguese and Russian don't have vowel-less roots like Arabic. What determines the best script for a language is usually its phonemic and morphemic representation, not its stress type. Abjads are more suitable for languages like Arabic and Hebrew because the roots of the words are consonant-based, and the vowels change according to grammatical rules. It is beautiful but would create a lot of confusion for languages like Russian and Portuguese, regardless of the stress type.03/28/20