Re: oh mother and Da:d - more Arabic questions

On Mar 19, 6:13 am, Craoibhi...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Mar 15, 1:21 am, Marc <marc.ad...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mar 14, 4:34 pm, Yusuf B Gursey <y...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

the phoneme is rare in other languages. ironically the original lateral
pronounciation has been lost, except perhaps in some obscure yemeni
dialects.

"Lateral" pronunciation?

I knew Arabs were sneaky, but to _literally_ talk out of the side of
your mouth? <rim shot>

Marc

"Lateral" refers to L. I think Jussi Aro said in his Arabic textbook
"Arabiaa ilman kyyneliä", that Da:d was once pronounced with a
preceding L, and he mentioned the name of some Arabic god or demon
from the days of old Jahiliyya - the name was ru:Da, but it had been
written "ru-ul-da" in some non-Arabic inscriptions which used a
different alphabet.

That does not mean that there was a "preceding L"! It means that a
lateral component to the sound was heard by the people who wrote the
name in cuneiform.

The emphatic lateral is well known in Modern South Arabian' English
[l] is of course a lateral, with the airstream passing both sides of
the tongue; and the voiceless lateral is familiar from Welsh and many
North American languages. In Welsh it's spelled <ll>, as in Llewellyn,
which Shakespeare rendered as Fluellen, because that's what it sounds
like to the English ear. (Likewise Floyd for Lloyd.)
.