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Re: Arabic 'sura' (?)-- a question

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Friday, December 21, 2001, 10:52
En réponse à David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>:

> > It's not really an [h], is it? It has the same form, but it's > always > been called "taa marbuta" when I've seen it, and it always carries the > two > dots. Is this related to all those words in Hebrew that have a silent > /h/ at > the end of them? Wow! >
AFAIK, it's not related to the /h/, but to the /t/. It's indeed a "taa" which has been closed on top (maybe because it appears so often at the end of many feminine words, and thus was abbreviated compared to the final form of a normal "taa"), making it look a little like a "haa", but with still the two dots. It's not pronounced only at the pause and in dialects. It's the real mark of the feminine in many words (the /a/ preceeding it is only a consequence of its presence. In Old Arabic, the feminine ending was definitely -atu)and it carries the case vowels of feminine nouns with it. So as soon as the case vowel is pronounced, the /t/ is pronounced too. Also, it's never part of a root (since it's a suffix). I guess the root for suura should be something like s-w- r (a concave root, i.e. with a semi-vowel in the middle, making it irregular - Arabian grammars call those roots "sick" :)) ). Of course, it's just a guess, so I could be wrong. Christophe. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.