On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 5:12 AM, Tim Starling <[email protected]> wrote: > Arabic may have spread from Morocco to Malaysia, but Cairo is quite close > to the Arabian peninsula, so I wonder if you're not overgeneralising.
From: http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/Profile.aspx?menu=004&LangID=51 "Egyptian Arabic is distinguished by a larger vowel inventory than Classical Arabic, with four short vowels (plus epenthetic schwa) and six long vowels, compared to three short vowels and six long vowels in Classical Arabic. Consonantal changes have included the loss of interdental fricatives. Egyptian Arabic is also characterized by two regular phonological processes lacking in Standard Arabic. First, all long vowels become shortened in unstressed positions and before consonant clusters. And second, many instances of short i and u are dropped by a process known as high vowel deletion. For example, when the feminine suffix -a is added to the participle kaatib "having written (masc.)", the i is deleted, resulting in katba. Like other varieties of Arabic, Egyptian Arabic derives the bulk of its vocabulary by applying a number of patterns or templates to a stock of consonantal roots. For example, from the triliteral root (three-consonant root) g-w-z with the basic meaning of "pair" is derived gooz "pair; husband", yiggawwiz "to get married", gawaaz "marriage", and migwiz "double". As an example of a template, the template maCCaC is used to derive many nouns referring to a place where an activity is done by substituting the C's in the template with the consonants of a triliteral root, such as: maktab "office" (a place where one writes) and maTbax "kitchen" (a place where one cooks). Verbs occur in two aspects: the perfective and the imperfective. The perfective is usually translated as a past tense or present perfect. Its conjugational morphology consists entirely of suffixes, for example: katab "he wrote", katabit "she wrote", katabt "I wrote", katabna "we wrote". The plain imperfective form is used much like an infinitive or subjunctive, as yiktib "he writes" in biyHibb yiktib"he likes to write". The imperfective also serves as the basis for the present and future tenses with particles bi and Ha, as in biyiktib "he writes" and Hayiktib "he will write". The conjugational morphology of the imperfective employs both prefixes and suffixes. For example, from the imperfective stem ktib we get yiktib "he writes", tiktib "she writes", and yiktibu "they write". The imperative is formed by leaving off the prefix of the imperfective. Verbs, and certain other elements, are usually negated by simultaneous use of the particles ma- and -š. Sometimes these particles are affixed to either side of the verb, as in the past tense makatabš "he didn't write", while in other cases, the particles combine to form the separate word miš "not" which occurs before the verb, as in the future miš Hayiktib "he won't write". In addition to the direct object clitics found in Standard Arabic, Egyptian Arabic also has indirect object clitics which follow any direct object clitic but precede negative -š. For example, "he wrote" is katab, "he wrote it (fem.)" is katabha, "he wrote it to you" is katabhaalak, and finally "he didn't write it to you" is makatabhalakš. As in Standard Arabic, nouns are either masculine or feminine, and either singular, dual, or plural, and plurals are either sound (regular) or broken (irregular) employing a suffix or broken (irregular) employing a different template, as described in the Arabic Overview. Broken plurals are not restricted to a small subset of the vocabulary and are frequently used even with loanwords having three or four consonants, such as the English loanword sikšin "section" > sakaašin"sections". Many adjectives also have broken plural forms. Egyptian Arabic is much less averse to borrowing than Standard Arabic, and the sources from which it has borrowed reflects the influence that different peoples have had in Egypt over its history. Many borrowings remain from Coptic, a Cushitic language which has been dead for several centuries but which was the dominant language in Egypt when the Arabs first arrived. Borrowings from Coptic are concentrated in fields of activity for which were foreign to Peninsular Arabic culture, such as agriculture. Later borrowings came primarily from Greek, Italian, French, and English. Most new borrowings are from English. Like other modern dialects, though unlike Standard Arabic, the predominant word order in Egyptian Arabic is Subject Verb Object (SVO)." This is a lot. Not like difference between Hittite and English, but it is like differences between Old Church Slavonic and Serbian or between Latin and Italian. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
