Arabic-L:LING:Vowel length in Palestinian response

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 27 Feb 2008
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1) Subject:Vowel length in Palestinian response

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1)
Date: 27 Feb 2008
From:Uri Horesh <urih at mail.utexas.edu>
Subject:Vowel length in Palestinian response

One of the facts I learned quite some time ago about neighboring  
dialects is
that while they can be easily classified jointly in dialect clusters,  
they
often have significant differences in various aspects of their grammar,
often too subtle for the non-linguist ear to detect.

One such difference is between urban Palestinian (e.g., Jerusalem) and  
urban
Syrian (e.g., Damascus) Arabic. The retention of long vowels in  
unstressed
syllables is almost categorical in Damascene Arabic and their  
shortening is
near-categorical in most Palestinian dialects. A short, but compelling
reference for this difference is the following:

Raz, Shlomo. 1996. Prominence and Vowel Duration in Some Spoken Arabic
Dialects. Israel Oriental Studies 16: 193-199.

I recently began looking into a number of features that Syrian Arabic  
shares
with Iraqi dialects, but not with other Levantine dialects. Unstressed  
long
vowel retention appears to be one of them. My very preliminary data at  
the
moment indicates that not only Palestinian, but also Lebanese Arabic
shortens such vowels, including within the stem, e.g.:

(1)  mif'taaH 'key'
(2)  mafaa'tiiH 'keys' (Syrian; Iraqi)
(2') mafa'tiiH 'keys' (Palestinian; Lebanese)

As for high (or rather, non-low) vowels, the two examples that comes  
to mind
from Jerusalem Arabic are:

(3) zeet 'oil'
(4) zi'tuun ~ za'tuun 'olives'

(5) 3een 'eye'
(6) 3i'neen 'eyes'

Examples (3) through (6) are from the following source:

Levin, Aryeh. 1994. A Grammar of the Arabic Dialect of Jerusalem.  
Jerusalem:
The Magnes Press. [in Hebrew].

I admit, though, that I'd have to think more about this particular  
point.

At any rate, I am doubtful that sound plurals and other stem-internal
patterns trigger anything else in terms of unstressed vowel shortening  
than
do combinations of stems and suffixes. But if there is data to the  
contrary,
I'd be quite interested.

BTW -- I tend to think that the 3aalameen example cited by Kenstowicz  
from
Abi-Salim retains the long /aa/ because it is stressed. While the suffix
-een is clearly stressed, the stem vowel in the syllable /3aa/ is not
unstressed. It bears in the least secondary stress.


Uri

-- 
Uri Horesh
Lecturer of Arabic
Department of Middle Eastern Studies
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station, F9400
Austin, TX 78712-0527
Tel : 512-475-6644
Cell: 267-475-5594
Fax : 512-471-7834
urih at mail.utexas.edu   http://ling.upenn.edu/~urih

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