Arabic-L:LING:wa- as a standalone character

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Sun 24 Feb 2013
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1) Subject:wa- as a standalone character
2) Subject:wa- as a standalone character
3) Subject:wa- as a standalone character
4) Subject:wa- as a standalone character
5) Subject:wa- as a standalone character
6) Subject:wa- as a standalone character

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1)
Date: 24 Feb 2013
From:mcredi at cloud9.net
Subject:wa- as a standalone character

The general principle is that a letter cannot be a word in Arabic. This is
true for the conjunctions of coordination "waw" and "fa'"  as well as the
prepositions "li-" and "bi-" and any one-letter "word". They are part of
the following word. As far as I can tell, this new tendency of writing
"waw" on its own originated in posters or advertisements influenced by the
West advertisement techniques. We also see this phenomenon in the generic
of movies. As evidence of that is the fact that none of the other examples
I mentioned are treated as independent words.

Medhat Credi

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2)
Date: 24 Feb 2013
From:"Dr. Baudouin Joseph-Gabriel" <legrandbosra at yahoo.fr>
Subject:wa- as a standalone character

Salaam to all,
It's true what you said about how the "waw" it's used; but in NLP it's
easier if it's written alone otherwise it needs more processing to seperate
it and this processing can produce new identification what can false the
translation for example. So I advise to let an espace between the "waw" and
the following word.
Best

Cordialement,
JGB.
0380576337
0760342951

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3)
Date: 24 Feb 2013
From:"Hilmi, Sana N." <shilmi at nvcc.edu>
Subject:wa- as a standalone character

I was also taught to attach it to the word that follows it as if it is one
word. I’ve never seen it in a different format.
In fact, we can’t write it in at the end of a line, as

رأيتُ طلابـاً كثيرين في الملعب و
طالِـبات كثيرات في الفصل.

Take care,
Sana

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4)
Date: 24 Feb 2013
From:"Amin, Nesrin" <N.Amin at exeter.ac.uk>
Subject:wa- as a standalone character

I believe that on the contrary, an independent waw is more commonly seen in
older publications, before the days of word processing, when the position
of the waw on the line could be controlled by the typist/typesetter. People
are more aware nowadays of not leaving a space to avoid ending up with a
waw at the end of a line - which as far as I know is the right thing to do
because I believe there are no one-letter words in Arabic. bi-, li-, ka-,
fa- all attach to the following words, as should wa (but it just so happens
to be a letter which does not connect to the following letter).

Regards,
Nesrin

-----
Nesrin Amin

Lecturer
Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies
University of Exeter
Stocker Road, Exeter EX4 4ND
Tel: (01392) 724093

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5)
Date: 24 Feb 2013
From:Mustafa Mughazy <mustafa.mughazy at wmich.edu>
Subject:wa- as a standalone character

Hello Elley,

The wa- is a prefix in MSA, so it has to be attached to the stem.
However, in some variations of MSA, especially in North Africa, it is
becoming an independent word possibly as a result of close interaction with
French.

Thanks,
Mustafa Mughazy

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6)
Date: 24 Feb 2013
From:Dil Parkinson <dil at byu.edu>
Subject:wa- as a standalone character

This is one of those areas where actual practice and 'the rules' don't
necessarily coincide, and where there is a kind of cline between patterns
that appear simply to be typos all the way to very acceptable alternatives.
 I looked at the quantitative results for wa- standing alone in arabiCorpus
and found, first, that it is quite common for wa- to have a space after it
before numbers and punctuation (quotation marks and the like which are
placed around a word without the wa-).  When I ran a search just on
standalone wa- before other Arabic letters (excluding the numbers and the
punctuation), I got the following results for Al-Ghad (a Jordanian paper)
and Al-Tajdid (a Moroccan paper):

Al-Ghad: 7.41 per 100,000

Tajdid: 271.12 per 100,000

Clearly, Mustafa's insight in the above message is accurate: the amount of
standalone wa- in Jordan could be considered random errors, but the pattern
for Morocco indicates that it is a common and valid choice.  This is over
35 times more common in the Moroccan paper than in the Jordanian one, a
major difference that implies entirely different attitudes toward the form.

I then decided to look at all the papers for standalone wa- (i.e. wa-
followed by a space) where the next word starts with Alif lam (normally the
definite article).  I got the following surprising results:

Tajdid (Morocco): 79.18 per 100,000

Thawra (Syria): 65.36 per 100,000

Ahram (Egypt): 4.18 per 100,000

Shuruq (Egypt): 4.26 per 100,000

Watan (Kuwait): 2.34 per 100,000

AlGhad02 (Jordan): 2.38 per 100,000

Al-Ghad01 (Jordan): 2.18 per 100,000

Al-Masri Al-Yawm (Egypt): 0.76 per 100,000

Al-Hayat96 (London): 0.37  per 100,000

Al-Hayat97 (London): 0.32 per 100,000

Of note here:

1. Surprisingly, Syria is patterning much more closely with Morocco than
with all the other countries for which I have evidence, which are much
closer to it geographically than Morocco.

2. There is a very striking consistency in the other data.  I have two
separate years for al-Hayat, and two for Al-Ghad, and each has an almost
identical pattern with the other.  Two of the Egyptian papers also pattern
very closely together.

3. Except for Syrian paper, the other papers are 20 times to over 200 times
less likely to use the standalone wa-, compared to the Moroccan paper.
For those who would like to see some of this data themselves, you need to
use regular expressions in the transliteration box of arabiCorpus.  To look
for examples of standalone wa- (i.e. followed by a space) where the
following word starts with alif lam, choose 'string' as the part of speech,
choose a particular paper to look at, and search for:

\bw Al

\b means a word break. Make sure to do the capitalization right.

If you want to search for standalone wa- no matter what is following it,
again choose 'string', and search for:

\bw\b

If you want to search for standalone wa- followed by any alphabetic letter,
but not numbers or punctuation, then choose 'string' and search for:

\bw [AbtVjHxdvrzspSDTZcgfqklmnhwyLEM]

You need to be fairly patient for these searches to go through.  Of course,
any of them can be varied in a large number of ways to tweak the results.
 Once the results come back, you can see the ratio per 100,000 on the first
page (as well as the actual number of forms found), but you need to click
on 'Citations' or 'Word Forms' to see the actual examples it found.

Since many of the papers have data for exactly one year, the actual numbers
are fairly interpretable: if there are about 350 actual forms in a year,
that means you are going to see a standalone wa- about once a day; if about
700 then about twice a day, etc.  The Moroccan and Kuwaiti papers represent
about a half of a year, so for them you would need to double the actual
numbers found to get the same insight.

If you made it this far, I hope you enjoyed it.
dil

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End of Arabic-L: 24 Feb 2013

"Amin, Nesrin" <N.Amin at exeter.ac.uk>
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