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Prominence and Syllabication in Arabic1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

T. F. Mitchell
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Extract

Faced with the fact that in many varieties of Arabic, including Bedouin dialects of the kind to which Sibawayhi was wont to turn, polysyllabic words and certain other unitary complexes are characterized in pronunciation by the prominence which makes one syllable stand out to the ear above the others, the linguist is understandably puzzled by the failure of the Arab grammarians to mention the subject of accentuation. Bewilderment increases with the realization not only that rules of prominence are statable for a given colloquial but also that correspondence between colloquials or between a colloquial and a given ‘Classical’ pronunciation is equally regular. Confusion is complete when the ‘rules’ given in all reference grammars of Classical Arabic are found to take no cognizance of regional differences of pronunciation and, what is worse, to bear little or no resemblance to the facts in any one region.

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Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , June 1960 , pp. 369 - 389
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Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1960

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References

2 The chief phonetic features distinguishing the prominent syllable are (i) the greater stress or force with which it is uttered in comparison with other syllables of the form, (ii) the higher pitch of at least its initial phase in relation to adjoining syllables, (iii) the kinetic or moving (falling) tone on which it is pronounced in contrast with the static or level tones of the remaining non-prominent syllables. The typical pitch-pattern of, say, the Classical paroxytone katabataa, as pronounced in Egypt as a word-isolate in unemphatic style, may be represented ––/_.

3 Brief conventions for reading transcribed Arabic forms are:

Consonant-letters

θ, ð voiceless and voiced dental fricatives; ʃ voiceless palato-alveolar fricative, j voiced palato-alveolar affricate (Egypt) and voiced palato-alveolar fricative (Cyrenaica); r an alveolar flap, rr an alveolar roll; x, ɣ voiceless and voiced uvular fricatives; ɧ, voiceless and voiced pharyngal fricatives; q a voiceless uvular plosive; ʕ a glottal plosive; ʂ, ʈ, δ, ɖ, ʐ, ‘emphatic’ or ‘velarized’ consonants, corresponding to non-emphatic s, t, ð, d, z respectively and in the pronunciation of which the tongue is laterally expanded throughout its length and flattened in rear of the tip, while lip-position is neutral; for s, t, ð, d, z the tongue is laterally contracted and the front raised towards ths hard palate, and the lips are spread.

Vowel-letters

i a half-close front spread vowel, close when final or long; u a half-close back to central vowel, rounded (Egypt), unrounded (Cyrenaica), close rounded when final or long; a, ɑ front and back open vowels; e and o (Egypt only), mid to half-close front and back vowels, spread and rounded respectively; ie (Cyrenaica only) a falling diphthong moving from half-close front to mid front and occurring only in prominent syllables.

Doubled letters

Long vowels are indicated by doubling the vowel-letter. Doubled consonants are pronounced longer than their single counterparts and with greater tenseness of articulation.

Acute accent

The prominent syllable is indicated by an acute accent placed over the appropriate vowel-letter.

1 Arabic letter-name.

2 This is not intended as a criticism of the Arabic (consonantal) system of writing, which serves exceedingly well the orthographic purpose for which it is intended.

3 The research on which subsequent analysis of CA(E) material is based was conducted some years ago with two postgraduate students, A and D, of the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, both of whom were approximately 30 years of age and had spent eight or nine years at Al-Azhar. They now both hold lectureships at the University of Cairo.

1 CVCC and CVVCC are distributionally restricted to final position. CWCC is, in fact, rare and almost wholly associated with monosyllables.

2 The only ‘exceptions’ found concern the so-called ‘wa of accompanying circumstance’ followed by either of the two pronominal forms huwa and hiya; wáhwa and wáhya are regularly heard. This is likely to be a reflex of colloquial usage, in which the comparable particle wi is often similarly prominent. Since wáhwa and wáhya are not isolable in the manner of the rest of the material we are considering, they are not, strictly speaking, exceptional.

3 Pause-forms in relation to non-pause forms involve principally the ‘omission’ of final flectional a, i, u, un, and in, and the use of a common ending -ah to correspond variously to non-pausal -atun/-atan/-atin. Thus, quoting for purposes of illustration one example only from a range of possible non-pause forms, we have the same words: kátab (pause)—kátaba (non-pause), yárif (pause)—yarífu (non-pause), muállim (pause)—muáaliímun (non-pause). muqaatílah (pause)—muqaatílatun (non-pause).

4 In the sample of forms, the semicolon has been used in anticipation of the classification that will subsequently be made.

1 CWCC has not been specifically illustrated but in the few disyllabic forms in which it occurs, it is quantitatively equipollent with CVCC.

1 In the single case of the pattern illustrated by ʃajaratuhúmaa, though the prominent syllable is distinguished by the same features as elsewhere, certain of the remaining syllables are also more prominent than others by virtue of the higher relative pitch with which they are associated. The total pitch pattern of ʃajaratuhúmaa in typical unemphatic utterance may be shown.

1 My Lebanese informant was Professor Anis Frayha of the American University in Beirut. Unlike the two Azhar-trained Egyptians, F does not distinguish between short and long vowels in post-tonic position; thus, F's ráʕa, háwwa, raqábati, etc., correspond to A's and D's ráʕaa, háwwaa, raqábatii, etc. The distinction observed by A and D between, say, kátaba (3rd person sing, mase, perfect) and kátabaa (3rd person dual masc, perfect) corresponds to a difference of prominence and final-vowel length in F's usage between kátaba and katabáa. Vowel-length and prominence here are concomitant and serve to mark the dual grammatical category in the verb (cf., too, F's corresponding feminine dual form katabáaa). Other regular differences of prominence between F's Classical usage and that of A and D relate to the patterns –//S/Ḻ and-/S/S/S/Ḻ, both proparoxytonic for F as in, say, ʕíʂbaah, saʕálahu, raqábati, mufakkirátuhu.

2 My informant in this case is Dr. Walīd ‘Arafāt, a colleague at SOAS.

1 See The phonetics of Il-Karnak dialect (Upper Egypt) by Dawood, T. H. O. M., thesis presented for the degree of Master of Arts in the University of London in 04 1949.Google Scholar

2 See, for example, The phonology of colloquial Egyptian Arabic by Harrell, Richard S., American Council of Learned Societies, New York, 1957, pp. 15–16.Google Scholar For Harrell prominence in Cairene is ‘phonemic’, i.e. is ‘significant’ in some not very clearly defined manner, ‘is not completely predictable in terms of other phonological elements’. The case for prominence as a phoneme seems to rest on such contrasting pairs as síkit ‘he was silent’ and sikít ‘I/you (m.s.) was/were silent’, or on, say, mustaíd ‘ready’ and mutámid ‘dependent’. Harrell objects to the practice of writing double letters final in Cairene words, as, for example, sikítt and mustaídd, since ‘a prepause geminate becomes definable only in terms of length’ and ‘Egyptian Arabic shows no organised use of prepausai consonant length’. Insufficiency is often thus encountered in phonemic analyses when important differential features are observable but do not lend themselves readily to representation in roman writing; as far as consonant length goes, Harrell's observation is accurate and timely, but he has not noticed other relevant differences of phonetic form. Firmer contact between the tongue and the dento-alveolar zone of the palate as well as greater muscular tension of the tongue are perceptible in the pronunciation of the final consonant of sikít and mustaíd as compared with that of síkit and mustámid; difference of length in the vowels of the pre-tonic syllables is also observable. These differences cannot easily be rendered in roman form except by the device of doubling the letter for sikítt and mustaídd, and, provided that reading conventions are adequately stated, it is difficult to see any valid objection to a practice which inter alia does much to simplify the formulation of rules of prominence.

3 Vowel-length and prominence are concomitant in CC. Moreover, long vowels do not occur, in typical unemphatic style, in closed pre-ultimate syllables. The structures CVVC and CVCC are limited to ultimate position, and ultimate CVV, since always associated with prominence, is most satisfactorily classified with CVVC and CVCC as long.

1 Harrell, , op. cit., p. 16.Google Scholar

2 A village and its surroundings approximately 20 km. south-south-west of Menouf (French spelling) in Munufiyya province. The linguistic information concerning this dialect has been provided by Mr. Mohamed Abu Farag, a lecturer in Arabic at the University of Alexandria, a native of Ṭahwēh, and at present studying at SOAS.

3 Other examples are ʂuɧúna ‘plates’, dukúra ‘males’, wurúda ‘(land) documents’, numúra ‘tigers’, kuúba ‘counterfoils’, durúba ‘lanes’, fuʂúla ‘(underhand) tricks’, buɤúla ‘mulish people’, nuúla ‘heels’, butúma ‘(field-)boundaries’, nusúra ‘eagles’, turúsa ‘gear-wheels’, furúa ‘necklaces’, rumúʃa ‘eyelashes’, wuɧúʃa ‘wild animals’, fulúga ‘cracks, splits’, kurúta ‘cards’, kuʃúfa ‘lists’, (iʃ)ʃurúa ‘(the) members of the Shar ‘family’, (il) udúla ‘(the) members of the ‘Adli family’, (il) utúsa ‘(the) members of the’ Abu ‘Ats family’, etc. Educated speakers in the village would tend to use ʂuɧúun for ʂuɧúna, fuʂúla for fuʂúla, rumúuʃ (or ri-) for rumúʃa, wuɧúuʃ (or wi-) for wuɧúʃa, etc., but no alternatives are available even in educated colloquial usage for dukúra, subúa, ɖubúa, and some others.

1 It should be observed that elision of i and u does not obtain if the relevant syllable is also prominent, a good example of the close relation between prominence and syllabication; cf. fάɖɖɑ + ílabu = fάɖɖɑ ílabu ‘he emptied his boxes’, ʕábu + úmɑr = ʕabu úmar ‘Omar's father’, etc.

2 See my ‘Syntagmatic relations in linguistic analysis’, Transactions of the Philological Society, 1958, passim.Google Scholar

1 Similar sonant behaviour, differently distributed, is observable in all Egyptian dialects and in most other colloquial forms of Eastern Arabic. The ‘placing’ of a form in relation to others within the total material to be analysed always involves consideration of a whole set or whole sets of forms to which it belongs. To take an example from TD, it might at first sight seem reasonable to be satisfied with a straightforward phonematic alternance in the first syllable of, say, ádla (aadil + a) ‘just (f.s. )’, gírba ‘goatskin’, and úgla ‘section of sugar-cane or maize stalk’. That such an alternance may be established for a structure CVCCV is unquestionable, but fárxa ‘chicken’, for example, would be better chosen than ádla to illustrate CaCCV. Partly on the basis of the relation between áadil and ádla, there are good grounds for considering ádla as adζla, where ζ = zero, and for contrasting zero with the vowel of the second syllables of, say, kátaba, ínaba, úgala, etc. Although the nominal and adjectival patterns CáCaCa, CíCaCa, CúCaCa, CuCúCa, and CiCiCa are common, it is an interesting corroboration of the view of ádla as CáCζCa that the only two forms exhibiting the pattern CáCiCa, viz. sámiga ‘antipathetic (f.s.)’ and wáqiɧa ‘rude (f.s.)’, are ‘learned’ and used only by educated inhabitants of the village.

2 My chief informant, over a period of 18 months, was Idris Abdalla, a Bedouin from Cyrene and the Ḥāsa tribe, who now commands the Libyan police. Examples given are based on I's usage, subsequently checked in the field.

3 ‘he wrote: she wrote: she wrote it’.

4 ‘office: his office’.

5 ‘he writes: they write’.

6 ‘he understands: they understand’.

1 Examples are ɧɑgg ‘he looked; right’: ɧugg ‘look!’ (impve. m.s.): ɧigg ‘young camel; calf’, rάbbi ‘God’: rúbbi ‘kind of jam’: ríbbi ‘rabbi’, urkάb ‘stirrups’: urkúb ‘knees’: irkíb ‘he mounted’. Even in these examples, phonetic differences which may in the phonemic manner be minimally localized in the vowel are never more than twofold. See also p. 388, n. 2 and passim.

2 An example of this difference is ʃakk ‘he became angry: he doubted; doubt’: ʃɑ;kk ‘he scratched, struck a match’. Cf., too, the 2nd p.pl. pronominal suffixes -kan (f.) and -kɑm (m.).

3 The corresponding long vowel of, say, gaadúum ‘axe’ may, in rapid style, be pronounced as short as a in ɧaʃíiʃ, but elsewhere it is pronounced slightly longer and may, unlike a in ɧaʃíiʃ, be fully long in poetry. These facts have been represented in the reading transcription by brackets as in ga(a)dúum. In a similar manner, the first vowel in, say, miizíen ‘scales’ may be pronounced short in rapid speech but, in addition to its greater length elsewhere, it is always qualitatively closer than i in kibíir. In the same way, uu in suuníyyih. ‘basin’, whatever its length in the instance, is always close, back, and rounded, unlike u in ʈuríig.

4 Variously transcribed x, ɣ, ɧ, , h.

5 For the meaning of emphasis, see p. 369, n. 3.Google Scholar

1 In the difference of verb-type or conjugation exemplified by yáfham, on the one hand, and yíkatib, on the other, the alternance is better regarded as of both syllables considered as a whole rather than individually; features of openness and closeness characterize the whole forms, and this is even more strikingly so in the corresponding plural forms yáfhamaw and yíkitbu.

2 ‘he divided up: he divided it (m.) up: he divided it (f.) up ≠ divide up!: divide it (m.) up!: divide it (f.) up!’

3 ‘he forgave: he forgave him: he forgave her ≠ forgive!: forgive him!: forgive her!’ For a(a) see p. 379, n. 3.

4 The limit of close definition is represented by the statement that any open vowel is V, except in the case of the -ɑh variant of the feminine-singulative suffix, e.g. ʃάnʈɑh ‘bag’, iʃjúrɑh ‘tree’; see p. 382Google Scholar, n. 3. The sonant v, once established, is found never to correlate with open quality.

1 See p. 382, n. 3.

2 The implication of the junction of h- with a preceding voiceless consonant is gemination of the consonant.

1 Quality varies in direct proportion to other differences in total forms; there are no subclasses of anaptyctic vowel based on qualitative differences.

2 An initial anaptyctic vowel may be very short, especially in rapid style, and may, in the presence of a voiceless first consonant, correlate not with vocalic form but with greater length of the consonant than in other contexts. The impression received from such a pronunciation of, say, ismí (contrast símat) is always of a disyllabic, due partly no doubt to the length of the sibilant but probably also to its association with a specific chest-pulse. It may be noted that in order to write such forms in the Arabic script an initial alif was invariably used by my informant and also invariably occurs in the Bedouin poems that appear in local newspapers.

3 There are in Cy.D two suffixes, grammatically distinct but similar as to phonetic form—completely so when final. ‘Conditioned’ variants of the suiSxes are transcribed -ih and -ɑh, the quality of the vowel belonging to syntagmatic categories of frontness and backness characteristic of total forms. One of these suffixes is the 3rd person mase. sing, suffix, which has already been extensively illustrated. The other is a mark of feminine gender and frequently also of singulative number. The term ‘singulative’ is needed to designate such a form as, say, iʃjúrɑh. ‘(one) tree’ within a total scatter which includes ʃujάr ‘trees’ (collective), iʃjúrɑh ‘tree’ (singulative), iʃjurάɑt ‘(a few) trees’ (‘counted’ or little plural), ʃujurtáyn ‘two trees’ (dual), aʃjάɑr ‘(groups or various kinds of) trees’ (plural or big plural). The 3rd p.m.s. suffix only occurs final and there is no justification from comparison with related forms within the range of material we are considering for regarding its vowel component as other than sonant V. The feminine-singulative suffix, on the other hand, may occur both final and non-final; in the latter case, it is characterized by a consonant -t- and, in appropriate contexts, by a vowel which precedes -t- and varies in quality between half-close front (i) and central (u) as the total form varies between front and back. The behaviour of this vowel is an exact reflex of the vowel (underlined) in, say, gássm, yíktb, etc., cf. ɤάɑbɑh ‘wood, copse’: ɤάɑbtih (ɤɑɑbɑh + ih) ‘his, its wood’, gúʂʂɑh ‘story’: gúʂʂtih (gúʂʂɑh + ih), kilmih ‘word’: kílimtih (kilmih. + ih), etc., and it is therefore regarded as belonging to the bonant category v.

1 See preceding note.

1 See p. 379, n. 3.

2 cf. ijrάɑ ‘puppies’.

1 The Cy.D form is, in fact, reminiscent of that found in Bedouin dialects of Arabia, including Kuwait.

2 For information, the corresponding forms containing consonant-beginning suffixes are—with the suffix -ha used for illustration—as follows: kɑrhɑbútta, mɑʂxɑrútta, mɑrukútta, muɧrumútta, maɧlibítta.

3 See p. 382, n. 3.

1 In spite of the similarity of pattern, therefore, íe in iktibíetih is not to be equated with the íe of the feminine plural nominal suffix (variously -iet, -aat, -ɑɑt) in, say, iɧjilíetihiɧjilíetihiɧjilíetihiɧjilíetih ‘his (few) partridges’.

2 The vowel in the second syllable is longer than that in the first but not as long as that in the third. See p. 379, n. 3.

3 For information, the form ikta(a)bíet ‘books’ occurs more frequently than iktíb.

1 The vowel of the article is regarded as belonging to the sonant category v, not V, since in certain structures it is regularly ‘elided’.

2 -əw- and -əy- in such contexts are realized as a close back rounded vowel and close front spread vowel respectively, both short; examples are túʂrih (CVCawCVC) ‘his photo’, máʃtih (CVCayCVC) ‘his going, gait’. This reading convention applies also to -uw and -iy final, e.g. fíluw ‘foal’, máʃiy ‘going, gait’, and to -iy initial, e.g. iyάʈi ‘he gives’.

3 The pattern vCCCV is restricted almost wholly to article-noun complexes of which the noun in its corresponding isolate-form is characterized by an initial syllable aC- and the articulation of C of that syllable by dento-alveolarity.

1 It is only to plural forms of this category that the structure CVwəC relates cf. ɧúwil (not *ɧuul) ‘one-eyed (pl.)’ and contrast the verbal form ɧuul ‘separate!’ (impve. m.s.).

2 Once again it can be seen that certain phonetic features, roughly generalizable as front and back, are not exclusively referable to phonematic vowel-units. Such differences as those obtaining between kátiʃ and bάʈun, líbis and kúbur, would be best formulated in a complete phonological analysis in terms of syntagmatic categories of frontness and backness.

1 We may notice the parallelism between the forms θíilbih (iθalab + ih), θiilbáyn (iθalab + ayn), iθalábha (iθalab + ha) and the earlier ʃújurtih, ʃujurtáyn, iʃjurútta.

2 See p. 387, n. 2.