The sound inventory

Hi everyone!

I’ve been slowly working through my original fuS7a to Shami series over the last few weeks to try and update it and make it a bit more readable. I’ll be posting the results as a new series of posts over the next couple of months. As the title suggests, I’ll generally be assuming a reasonable basic knowledge of fuS7a, since more or less everyone who learns a dialect will have that knowledge. But as before, I’ll be starting from the absolute basics and working up to more complicated concepts.

We’re going to start with phonology, the sound system of Levantine Arabic. I’ve written a short article on this before for the Living Arabic Project – a site you should absolutely check out in the unlikely event that you haven’t discovered it yet – and a lot of the content will obviously overlap. As I said there, dialect phonology is often taught not as an independent system but as a series of ‘transformations’ from fuS7a words allowing you to readily generate their dialect counterparts. I’ll probably write a post at some point explaining why this is overall a bad idea, pedagogically and linguistically. But for today we’re going to concentrate on the basic set of sounds that make up words.

Consonants

The consonant system of Syrian is fairly similar to that of fuS7a. The usual pronunciation of each of the consonants is given below, with those that differ from fuS7a coloured red. Note that in my transcription emphatic consonants are written with capitals:

ب	b	س	s	ك	k or g
ت	t	ش	sh	ل	l or L
ث	s	ص	S	م	m
ج	j	ض	D	ن	n
ح	7	ط	T	ه	h
خ	kh	ظ	Z	ء	2
د	d	ع	3	ي	y
ذ	z	غ	gh	و	w
ر	r	ف	f or v
ز	z	ق	q or 2

 

Note that ث, ذ and ظ (the ‘interdental’ sounds) are commonly pronounced s, z and Z (an emphatic z) by Syrian speakers:

ثانوي saanawi secondary	عذر 3izer apology
ذاتي zaati subjective	ظهور Zuhuur appearance

The letter ق is pronounced in some words as q (as in fuS7a) but in some words as a glottal stop 2 (like ء in fuS7a). Broadly speaking, more everyday words tend to have a glottal stop, while words that are ‘borrowed’ from fuS7a tend to have a q, but the correct choice must be learned with the word:

قال 2aal he said	BUT	ثقافة saqaafe culture
داق daa2 tasted	BUT	القرآن ilqur2aan the Qur’an

Note as well the sounds g and v, which appear in a handful of loanwords:

أركيلة 2argiile shisha pipe

فيديو vidyo video

 

Unlike fuS7a, Syrian allows initial consonant clusters:

كلاب klaab dogs	دروس droos study!
كتاب ktaab book	معلم m3allem teacher

Final consonant clusters, on the other hand, it tends to break up with a helping vowel ^e (more on this in our next post):

ضرب Dareb hitting	مصر maSer Egypt
حمص 7imeS Homs	فهد fahed Fahd

Vowels

The vowel system is more distinct from its fuS7a counterpart. As in fuS7a, there is a central distinction between short and long vowels. But as well as the long and short a i u familiar from fuS7a, there are four more vowel sounds, the short and long variants of e and o:

Short		Long
a	درس daras study	aa	كاتب kaateb writer
e	شرب shireb drank	ee	بيت beet house
i	رطب riTeb humid	ii	دير diir turn [something]
o	شافتو shaafto saw him	oo	دور door role
u	راحو raa7u they went	uu	توت tuut berries

 

Short e and o can only occur in final syllables. When an additional syllable is added – when another suffix is added, for example – they both become i:

كاتب kaateb male writer	BUT	كاتبنا kaatib-na our writer
بتكتب btiktob you write	BUT	بتكتبها btiktib-ha you write it

Suffixes beginning with vowels often cause short e and o to drop entirely:

كاتب kaateb male writer	BUT	كاتبة kaatb-e female writer
بتكتب btiktob you write	BUT	بتكتبو btikitb-u you [plural] write

There are also two diphthongs, ey and aw. ey occurs in a handful of words, while aw is common in words borrowed from fuS7a:

ey

بيروت beyruut Beirut

aw

دولة dawle state

 

That’s all for now. If you want to keep up with this and other translation/Arabic-related content, follow me on Twitter at Chris Hitchcock (@chm3na).