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Re: questions about Arabic

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Wednesday, March 21, 2001, 16:38
En réponse à David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>:

> <<I think you're confusing alif and hamza. IIRC, alif is simply the > vertical-stroke glyph (considered a consonant), which doesn't really > stand > for anything in itself except for a place marker, and hamza is the > diacritic > written with alif when you wish to indicate a glottal stop. So /ibn/ > (son) > is written with alif (+ /i/ sign) baa nun, beause it doesn't have a > glottal > stop, whereas /?ab/ (father) is writter alif + hamza (+ /a/ sign) baa, > with > the hamza representing the glottal stop. Both of these cases use alif, > but > only /?ab/ uses hamza.>> > > No, you've got it all wrong. Hamza is a glottal stop. However, it > can't just appear by itself (except in some orthographies, and that's > non-initial). /?Ibn/ is written with a hamza UNDERNEATH the alif, and > then with a kesra underneath that. If what you're seeing as /?Ibn/ > doesn't have a hamza underneath alif, then you're probably reading a > non-carefully voweled text, or just unvoweled.
Well, Eric was describing an unvoweled orthography. Moreover, I've already seen the word /ibn/ (// stand for phonemic transcription and not phonetic transcription. You have to use the square brackets [] to show the actual pronunciation. Writing /?ibn/ would mean that the word has a stable hamza, like /?ab/. It's not true though. That's why I use the phonemic transcription /ibn/ which has the following phonetic realizations (depending on environment): [?ibn] and [bn]) written voweled but without the hamza (and it wasn't incorrect since it was in a teaching book of Arabic). Finally, if I look at what you write and what Eric wrote, I just see the same, just said with different words. Calling the hamza a diacritic or a consonnant that cannot appear by itself except in a few cases doesn't change much things does it? After all, it's less wrong than saying that alif can stand for a vowel. Alif is just a bearer of
> hamza, just like yaa and waw can be. However, that's only when alif is > being used that way. It also stands for the vowel /ae/. >
No it doesn't! It just happens that in some dialects, /a/ and /a:/ have different pronunciations than in Standard Arabic. But you cannot say that alif stands for the vowel /ae/ because it never does! It has two uses: carrier and mark of length, and those uses are purely graphic. That's all! After that, saying that alif always appears when the vowel /ae/ is pronounced simply means that /a:/ is pronounced /ae/ in that dialect. Christophe. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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Eric Christopherson <rakko@...>