Arabic-L:LING/PEDA:jiim/giim

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Mon 01 May 2000
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject: jiim/giim

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1)
Date: 01 May 2000
From: mustafa a mughazy <mughazy at students.uiuc.edu>
Subject: jiim/giim

Here is my reaction to the posting on the /g/ and /j/ issue.
First of all, I think that MSA is viewed as one pan-Arab variety; however,
it would be unrealistic to view it as a frozen or invariant variety
because there are obvious systematic variations. In Egypt, the speech
community I am familiar with, [g] is not just acceptable, it is considered
fusha. Therefore, it is used in reciting the Quran and in TV news
broadcasts. The only times where [j] is used is in the formulaic sentence
[a3oozo bellahi min ashyTan ar-rajeem] and when specialists recite the
Quran. That is why when [j] is used for borrowed words the Arabic letter
has three dots rather than just one, the same as the letters for [p] and
[v]. Moreover, using [jiim] is called [ta3Teesh eg-giim] which suggests
that people perceive it as unnatural pronunciation. Actually, I knew that
[j] is the MSA form only when I started my Ph.D. at UIUC after 25 years of
formal education in Egypt.
Being an Arabic TA myself, I think it is crucial to expose students to
such variations because we do not want them to go to the Middle East and
be incapable of communicating after years of instruction.

Thanks a lot
Mustafa A. Mughazy
Linguistics Department
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champiagn
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End of Arabic-L: 01 May 2000