Re: Questions about Arabic phonology

From: Ruud Harmsen (realemailseesite01_at_rudhar.com.invalid)
Date: 03/28/05 

Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2005 23:15:24 +0200

Mon, 28 Mar 2005 17:07:28 GMT: "Paul" <paul.schrum@geopak.com>: in
sci.lang:

>The Emphatics
>1. Are the differences between a non-emphatic and an emphatic the same for
>all pairs. That is, are the differences between sin and sod the same
>differences as their are between daal and dod, etc.?

Yes. But the emphatic z (or whatever you prefer to call it) doesn't
correspond to z but to dhal (as th in English these).
The sounds is in MSA, and reportedly also still in some colloquial
dialects/languages.

>2. What are those differences.
>Nasr p 30 says, "Velarization, then, is a feature of sound modification
>effected by the flattening and grooving of the tongue at the velar point of
>articulation. . . . The important thing to remember about velarization is
>that a velarized consonant tends to velarize the rest of the word in which
>it occurs."
>
>Kaye p 669 says, "The 'emphatic' consonants, often misleadingly called
>velarized-pharangealized,

Is it? I don't know. I can make them (picked up by imitating Umm
Kalsoum), but don't know if I really also velarize and or
pharangalyse. Could also be just something in tongue position.

My imitations of the two Arabic s here,
http://rudhar.com/fonetics/shs/shs.htm , although it can be difficult
to appreciate the difference from these recordings.

>are depicted with a dot underneath the particular
>consonant. . . . The vowels around and emphatic consonant tend to become
>lower, retracted, and more centralised than around non-emphatics . . . ."

True.

>When I listened to my informant, the only difference my untrained ear could
>detect was a little gemination and a stronger force pushing the airstream.

There's certainly more to it. It isn't gemination. I heard Saddam said
with gemination, but that didn't make that dd anything like an
emphatic d.

>He told me that it sometimes happens that the native arabic speaker can not
>tell the difference when listening. (We only worked on sin/sod.)

Unlikely, if I can fairly easily, and AFAIK all types of spoken Arabic
have the difference. Egyptian has, anyway.

>3. Nasr p 31 claims that ra is velarized in some instances, but he does not
>say how to characterize those instances.

It does darken vowels in some dialects, Egptian being one.

>I do not see where he does, that
>is.) The IPA chart has velarized trills annotated as impossible,

The Egyptian r isn't always a trill, not in old Umm Kalsoum songs
anyway. (She sometimes sang in MSA, sometimes in Egyptian).

>ut it has
>the R symbol (which Nasr uses for velarized ra) listed as uvular.

AFAIK there is no uvular r in any kind of Arabic. If you hear anything
like it, it's not a r, but a ghain.

>The
>obvious guess is those are refering to the same phone, but can someone
>confirm that for me? Also, would [r] and [R] be allophones in Arabic?

There's only one r phoneme, AFAIK, if that's what you mean. And it's
always lingual.

>If
>so, and if the rules are not too involved, could someone tell me what those
>rules are?

Don't know.

>4. Nasr lists ghain and [x] as velar, but Kaye lists them as uvular. Does
>this vary by dialect?

Don't think so. They're very deep, almost uvular, like in my own
flavour of Dutch. See and hear http://rudhar.com/fonetics/cxch.htm
The velar sounds are what I call "Belgian". The (almost) uvular sounds
are Netherlands (non-southern) Dutch, Swiss German, Hebrew, and
Arabic.

>Is there agreement on these two for standard Arabic?

I think so. Xaa and ghain are the same in any kind of Arabic AFAIK.

>(I guessed that the difference between the two here is due to a dialect
>difference.)

Could be but isn't. More likely to due to ignorance of inaccuracy on
the part of those describing the sounds. 

-- 
Ruud Harmsen - http://rudhar.com/