ginormous (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Wilson Gray]

Thanks, Ben. Oh, by " ... rare outside Semitic languages," do you
really mean,, " ... hard as hell for a speaker of a European language
to learn to pronounce?" :-) BTW, are you old enough to remember when
"Saud(i)" was pronounced "Sah ood(ee)," with a glottal onset, if not
quite with a glottal stop, and not "Sawd(ee)"?

-Wilson

On 7/12/07, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: ginormous (UNCLASSIFIED)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> There's actually nothing like an "eye" diphthong in the (modern
> standard) Arabic pronunciation of "al Qaida" -- the scholarly
> transliteration would be <al qa:`ida>, where <a:> is a long "a" vowel
> and <`> is the ayin or voiced pharyngeal fricative. The ayin is
> frequently omitted in foreign pronunciations and transcriptions of
> Arabic (since it's rare outside Semitic languages), but it's there in
> the original separating the two vowels. If the ayin isn't going to be
> represented orthographically, then the "ae" spelling might be
> preferable to remind the reader that there's no diphthong there.
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
>
> On 7/12/07, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > WAG: Is it the case that "ai" is intended to represent the
> > Classical-Arabic sound, whereas "ae" is meant to reflect a more modern
> > pronunciation? Or not.
> >
> > -Wilson, who knows of Arabic only that it is a Semitic language
> >
> >
> > On 7/12/07, Tom Zurinskas <truespel at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Sorry all about the "K" I wrote in Al Kaeda, Al Kaida.  That should have
> > > been Al Qaeda, Al Qaida.  Basically I was focusing on the ae/ai difference.
> > > I had always seen it as "ai" before.  Now I see it "ae" in the newspapers.
> > >
> > > For truespel I needed a phonetic spelling for the sound "eye" (long i).  I
> > > picked ~ie (as in "pie,lie,tried).  This is in line with a rule that all
> > > "long" vowels are spelled with silent e moved over next to them
> > > (ae,ee,ie,oe,ue).
> > >
> > > More predominant for spelling that sound is the leter "i" alone (primarily
> > > due to the word "I".  Next is "i" with "silent e" and then "y", "igh", "ie"
> > > and "eye" with a few others.
>
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