Correspondences with fuS7a

Hi everyone!

In the last two posts we have been looking at the ‘phonology’ of Syrian Arabic (its inventory of sounds and its stress system). Before going on to look at other bits of the grammar, I wanted to write something about correspondences with fuS7a.

Beginners’ dialect classes often teach spoken Arabic as a sound-substitution game: apply a few sound changes to the fuS7a words you know and hey presto! – you’re speaking 3aammiyye. This is a terrible idea. For one thing, constantly translating in your head is no path to fluency. But more importantly, the vocabulary used in speech is not simply a modified version of fuS7a vocabulary. You can’t predict whether a fuS7a word will have a direct Syrian counterpart. Nor can you predict exactly how a counterpart that is used will be pronounced. You have to learn Syrian vocabulary as a system in its own right.

With this massive caveat looming over the post, however, I think it is worth briefly looking at some common relationships between fuS7a words and their Syrian counterparts, if only to help you get your bearings in a new (but related) sound system. To do this, we have to make a distinction between two broad sets of words:

Inherited words that have undergone complex sound changes relative to their fuS7a cognates.
Borrowed words that have entered the spoken language via the written language.

Inherited words

‘Inherited’ words make up the ‘core’ vocabulary of Syrian Arabic. These are words that have been around in Syrian for a long time and that have clearly undergone a long process of sound change vis-à-vis their fuS7a counterparts.

As we already know, the letter ق is usually pronounced 2 in these words. The interdentals th, dh and DH are generally replaced by t, d and D, and the hamza ء usually disappears:

Syrian	FuS7a
قال 2aal he said	قال qaala he said
تلاتة tlaate three	ثلاثة thalaatha three
ضهر Dah^er back	ظهر DHahr back
راس raas head	رأس ra2s head

Short i u generally merge to i and the fuS7a diphthongs aw ay are usually replaced by oo ee:

Syrian	FuS7a
مشكلة mishⁱkle problem	مشكلة mushkila problem
كنا kinna we were	كنا kunna we were
تور toor bull	ثور thawr bull

The suffix ـة, always pronounced -a in fuS7a, is pronounced -e after some letters. We will look at this in more detail in another post:

Syrian	FuS7a
دورة doora turn	دورة dawra turn
مشكلة mishⁱkle problem	مشكلة mushkila problem

Borrowed words

‘Borrowed’ words are words taken from fuS7a. The most obvious examples of this belong to the realm of higher-register or technical vocabulary coined in fuS7a and then used in speech. Nouns and adjectives of this kind are subject to only very limited adaptation, with the pronunciation of ـة changing and the interdental sounds th dh DH often pronounced s z Z:

Syrian	FuS7a
ثقافة saqaafe culture	ثقافة thaqaafa culture
عناية 3inaaye care	عناية 3inaaya care
ذرة zurra atom	ذرة dhurra atom

Use with caution

The way I’ve characterised these two categories above heavily implies a clear line between higher-register and lower-register vocabulary. It is true that most higher-register words use the fuS7a-style pronunciation. The problem is that since at least the advent of mass education, fuS7a influence on the spoken language is so pervasive that plenty of everyday lower-register words show at least some fuS7a-esque features:

Syrian	FuS7a
تذكر tzakkar remember	تذكر tadhakkara remember
عذر 3iz^er excuse	عذر 3udhr excuse
الظاهر ⁱZZaaher it seems that	الظاهر ^aDHDHaahir the appearance

Remember that you can only rely on this distinction so far in practice, and that there is absolutely no substitute for learning vocabulary as it is actually used!