One of the books on my 'must buy' list:
http://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Lang ... 0066210860Looks interesting and covers the subject of this thread.
The subject matter and his insights look interesting, but the reviews also talk about it being quite dense and technical book. But this may be right up Kanelli's street!
As for the differences between Arabic and English and pronunciations - each has its merits and features. Arabic indeed has sounds that aren't in English, and English has it's peculiar spellings and pronunciations. English has evolved from a number of languages, and over the years the pronunciations of words have changed (and that's before we get into dialects and accents). Many of the peculiar spellings are what is left-over from the vowel shift that occured centuries ago - the pronunciation changed, but the spellings didn't.
Even in the 20th century, pronunciation of words have changed since the early days of broadcasting. The clipped accents certainly have changed, but so have how we pronounce specific words (and many words now have two or more acceptable pronunciations).
As for being mono-lingual - I put it squarely down to laziness and the education system. One can get by with English alone and only read/watch media, etertainment etc in English. The education system by and large encourage this - but the better schools and more highly educated are better at languages because of better education - that applies to the UK and the US, as well as India and China (i.e. it is a universal phenomenon). But there is also a merchant class who are polyglots - a trip down to Deira and you'll find store keepers conversing in Russian, Urdu, Arabic, English etc - and whose mother tongue is either Bangla or Malayalam.
Now, when it comes to philology and how languages developed - Arabic is unique in the world as it is the only language where a speaker from 1500 years ago would be perfectly understood by more people today than when he was alive. It is the only language from that period (and many have come and gone since) that is still living today. It has other unique features - such as the fact that the more rural a community, the more 'pure' the language is - in that it has more root words. It is the Bedouin who speak the purest form of Arabic - the classical or 'Fursaa' - which has the greatest number of root words and least number of synonyms and homonyms.
Arabic also has the curious characteristic of having been studied as a science by non-Native Arabs to extract the rules of Grammar. The Bedu speak Fursa according to rules, but they never had schools to learn the rules.. and hence they weren't written down. The rules were only written down by Persian scholars who studied the language and worked out what the rules were. I.e. the rules describe the language and how it was being used.
(My pronunciation of Arabic is way way worse that the American dude on youtube - kudos to him!)
Cheers,
Shafique