Hi everyone!
In the last few posts we looked at the ‘phonology’ of Syrian Arabic (its inventory of sounds, its stress system, correspondences with fuS7a and sound changes caused by adding suffixes). It’s now time to consider some different types of words and how they interact with one another.
In this post, I will be talking about the most basic building block of any sentence: the noun. Specifically, I’ll be talking about three fundamental properties of the noun and how they work in Syrian: case (or more accurately word endings), gender, and definiteness. I’m going to leave number (singular, plural etc) for a later post in order to save space.
Case
The most obvious difference between fuS7a and Syrian is that the case/definiteness suffixes (-un, -an, -in, -u, -a, -i) are simply not present. Similarly, the masculine sound plural and dual are always ـين -iin and ـين -een respectively, and do not change for case:
| Syrian | fuS7a |
| درب dareb path |
درب darbun |
| معلمين m3allmiin teachers |
معلمون mu3allimuun |
| شخصين shakhSeen two people |
شخصان shakhSaan |
Note that nouns ending in a defective root consonant, which in fuS7a interact in a complicated way with case and definiteness markers, invariably end in a normal vowel. This applies both to ‘inherited’ and ‘borrowed’ vocabulary:
|
Syrian |
fuS7a |
|
قاضي |
قاضِ qaaDin judge |
| مستشفى mistashfa hospital |
مستشفى |
Gender
As in fuS7a, most feminine nouns are explicitly marked as such with the suffix ـة (the taa marbuuTa). This is pronounced -a after the sounds T D S Z q 7 3 kh gh 2 and after most (but not all) -r. Elsewhere it is pronounced -e:
| مدينة mdiine city |
BUT | طريقة Tarii2a way |
| غريبة ghariibe strange (f.) |
BUT | بطة baTTa duck |
| شفرة shafre razor |
BUT | متأخرة mit2akhkhra late (f.) |
The sequence ـاة –is commonly pronounced -aat, although some people say it -aa:
| حياة 7ayaa(t) life |
صلاة Salaa(t) prayer |
Note as well the following feminine words that show the shift to -e despite having a different suffix originally:
| Syrian | fuS7a |
| دنيا dinye world |
دنيا dunya world |
| شتى shite winter, rain |
شتاء shitaa2 winter |
There are a handful of words that are feminine despite having no feminine marker. Most of these are also feminine in fuS7a (شمس shams ‘sun’, سما sama ‘sky’, أرض 2arD ‘ground’ and حرب 7arb ‘war’). They also include مي mayy ‘water’, دكان dikkaan ‘shop, stall’, سكين sikkiin ‘knife’ and for many speakers بلد balad ‘country’, طريق Tarii2 ‘way’ and درب dareb ‘path’.
Definiteness
The definite article is الـ il- (not al-), with a helping vowel. It assimilates to all the same consonants as its fuS7a equivalent, and sometimes to ج j. Before consonant clusters it is usually pronounced li–:
| الدرب id-dareb the path |
الجو ij-jaww or il-jaww the weather |
| العين il-3een the eye |
الولاد li–wlaad the kids |
For the most part definiteness works more or less as it does in fuS7a. As well as words marked definite in English, it is also used to mark generics and abstract nouns, in concept names, etc. There are, however, a few exceptions, which we’ll discuss in a later post.
That’s all for today. Next time we’ll look at singular, dual and plural and how they work in Syrian. If you want to keep up with this and other translation/Arabic-related content, follow me on Twitter at Chris Hitchcock (@chm3na).