Re: questions about Arabic

En réponse à David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>:

>
> Oh yeah?  Then why do children who don't know how to write fully voweled
> Arabic think that alif stands for a long /a/ or /ae/?  (I was taught
> /ae/.)
Then you weren't taught Modern Standard Arabic. As for what children think, what
the heck does it have to do with what alif is? Later when they learn to right
with vowels (strangely enough, all the teaching books I saw were fully voweled.
I don't know where you take what you said but here in Europe and I'm sure in
Maghreb children are taught first the voweled version of Arabic, and after only
drop the vowels), they realize that alif does with the fatha what waw does with
the damma and what yaa does with the kasra: lengthening the vowel, nothing else
(when I was taught Arabic by a Tunisian friend, that's the first thing she
explained to me about those three letters). Also, if what you say is true, then
children must think that alif stands for /i/ in the word /ibn/, since in
unvoweled Arabic the unstable hamza is not written and only the alif remains.
But when I said that you quickly said that I was confused with the orthography.
As I see it, you're confused with your own arguments.


  Why have all the diacritics been dropped in most modern Arabic
> texts in favor of just waw yaa and alif?
Because the Arabic script derives from a script where the vowels were already
not written (except long vowels) and thanks to their own language structure were
able to adapt it without introducing vowels (unlike the Greeks who also took
their alphabet from Phoenician which didn't write the vowels, but decided to use
the unused letters to mark their vowels). The diacritical marks to mark short
vowels were devised later, mostly to make sure that the vocalisation of the
Qoran was correct. So the dropping of vowels has mostly a historical reason.

  Even if alif didn't originally
> represent a vowel, I think it can now.
>
Why? Isn't it as ridiculous as saying that because waw can mark a long /u:/, it
stands for that vowel? Of course not, and you wouldn't say that. If you argued
that alif stands for a semi-vowel (with no actual phonetic value though, but the
null can definitely be a mark IMHO), like waw and yaa, we could find a
compromise because of the likeness of their uses, and because that's how Arabic
grammarians treat those three letters (partly). But not as a vowel, sorry. There
is absolutely no reason to jump to such a fast conclusion.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr