Arabic-L:Long Vowel Response

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Thu 22 Mar 2001
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1) Subject: Long Vowel Response

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1)
Date: 22 Mar 2001
From: Ernest McCarus <enm at umich.edu>
Subject: Long Vowel Response

>in your analysis of the Arabic language would you consider the long vowels
>to be morphemes or allophones and why?

In Standard Arabic the long vowels are phonemes.  For example, the
long vowel aa is a phoneme, /aa/.  If it by itself carries meaning
then it will also be a morpheme, <aa>.  To illustrate, the pronoun
/hum/ means 'they (masculine plural)'; with the addition of <aa> it
becomes /humaa/ 'they (DUAL)'.  Thus, <aa> is the dual morpheme in
Standard Arabic; it is, of course, also found in nouns, e.g.,
/kitaab/ 'book' but /kitaabaahum/ 'their TWO books' and in verbs,
e.g., /katabat/ 'she wrote' and /katabataa/ 'they (feminine DUAL)
wrote'.  The /aa/ in /kitaab/ is merely a phoneme but in /katabataa/
it is a phoneme which is also a morpheme.

Allophones are variant pronunciations of a given phoneme, variations
that are determined by the adjacent phonemes.  Thus, the phoneme /aa/
has two principal allophonic types in most forms of Standard Arabic,
[aa] roughly like the "a" in English "cad" and [AA] like the "o" in
English "cod".  [AA] occurs in a "back" environment-one containing an
emphatic consonant, qaaf, etc.-whereas [aa] occurs only elsewhere.
So /aa/ is by definition not an allophone, but a symbol that stands
for a set of related allophones.

Allophones are phonetically similar but mutually exclusive; that is,
allophone A occurs in one particular environment only, allophone B
occurs only in a different particular environment, and allophone C
never occurs in either of those two environments.  To take the
Standard Arabic example above, [aa] and [AA] are phonetically similar
and [AA] only occurs in a back environment whereas [aa] never occurs
there; they are allophones of the phoneme /aa/.

How does one define "phoneme"?  Phonemes can be defined as the basic
distinctive units of speech for a given language; they are the
consonants and vowels of a language, plus "prosodic features", such
as:
accent (stress, like English "PERmit" [noun] vs. "perMIT" [verb]; or
pitch, like Japanese "hashi" which can mean "bridge", "edge", or
"chopsticks" depending on the pitch of the two vowels-high, mid, or
low);
length (of vowels, like Arabic bal 'but' vs. baal 'mind', or of
consonants, like `alam 'flag' vs. `allam 'he taught'); or
intonation, like the difference between /jaa`uu./ 'they came' vs.
/[hal] jaa'uu?/. 'Did they come?'

Ernest McCarus

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End of Arabic-L: 22 Mar 2001