Arabic-L:LING:standalone 'wa-'

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 27 Feb 2013
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:standalone 'wa-'
2) Subject:standalone 'wa-'

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1)
Date: 27 Feb 2013
From:Alexander Magidow <amagidow at gmail.com>
Subject:standalone 'wa-'

To add to the discussion, I wanted to add unedited writing as well as
published, but it looks like Google is less helpful than it used to be,
since it filters results to make them more relevant (and if you ask it not
to, it doesn't tell you how many hits you got.) However, I used a technique
pioneered by Fred Hoyt to look for dialect specific uses of a given word or
phrase. I would have liked to try to control for population size and
internet presence, but again I was stymied by Google search. Searches were
performed in Firefox, with the "private browsing" setting.

Just searching for " و " (waw surrounded by spaces) produces 1.48 billion
hits.
Searching for " و " and the following 'dialect key words' produces:
بزاف:
4.3 million hits

برشا:
1.82 million hits

عايز:
21.8 million hits

بدي:
35 million hits

It proved to be impossible to get a clear number of the results of these
searches without the waw and spaces component, since google filters for
relevancy and so the number of hits if you have fewer search terms is
actually lower, and if you change the search parameters it doesn't tell you
how many hits you got.

In any case, this shows that an independent waw is certainly not a rarity
in any of these dialect areas, and indeed I am most surprised by the number
of hits for dialects using بدي since there's dialects have relatively fewer
speakers and a smaller internet presence than e.g. Egypt and we'd expect,
if they had similar rates of use, for the Egyptian rate to be higher. This
fits well with Dil's investigations, though anecdotally I know of an Arabic
teacher from Egypt who in handwriting would write waw as an independent
word rather than a clitic, so it certainly is an increasingly established
convention that now goes beyond typing or typesetting.

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2)
Date: 27 Feb 2013
From:Annie Higgins <treesupreaching at gmail.com>
Subject:standalone 'wa-'

Dear Dil,
Thank you so much for this fantastic data. i was just telling students
today to keep their waw with the following word. Interesting that Hayat is
the standard bearer, maybe arabi version of keeping to King's english! I am
all for waw with no space, just like bi and li and ka, etc.

Alf shukr!
annie

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