Arabic-L:LING:Arabic Sound System Response

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 21 Jun 2000
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject: Arabic Sound System Response

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1)
Date: 21 Jun 2000
From: mustafa abd-elghafar mughazy <mughazy at students.uiuc.edu>
Subject: Arabic Sound System Response

I really like the idea of putting "Arabic" between quotation marks because
I do not think anyone who knows what it really is, the same as what
"language" means. I think "Arabic" is a very interesting language
situation because it defies the natural laws of language evolution.
However, it had to pay the price of spread: change. It has been in contact
with a host of other languages, centuries of social change and endless
attempts to modernize it. However, we still call it "Arabic" probably
because of ideological issues.
Classical Arabic, which has never been the mother tongue of any community,
is always (misleadingly) viewed as THE ARABIC. As far as I know, there
were many dialects of "Arabic" even before Islam, and even the Quran is in
different dialects. One of the dialects (Quraish Arabic) was the most
prestigious because of its political position at the time. Therefore, the
Tamim dialect that had [g] gave way to the [q] of Quraish. It is
interesting to see it happening again in Jordan where the [q] is dying in
favor of the urban glottal stop, and in Egypt where palatalization is
sweeping urban dialects. I think it is not more "umf" to the eloquence,
but to power and prestige.
By the way, I do not think McCarthy and Kenstowicz (also Alan Prince)
would consider themselves Arabic phonologists. They work on many languages
as well, but they might have found working on Arabic interesting and
insightful for linguistic theory in general. Many phonologists think so
too: Junko Ito and Steriade among them.
Mustafa Mughazy

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End of Arabic-L: 21 Jun 2000