Re: questions about Arabic

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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