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> Ghajar but pronouced Rhajar
doesn't the pronunciation of quasi 'Rh' rather than 'Gh' largely it depend on which Arab speaking place your from, or rather which dialect you speak. I know the Moroccans I've met sound very different from the Syrians I know, when speaking to one another in Arabic!
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In reply to:
doesn't the pronunciation of quasi 'Rh' rather than 'Gh' largely it depend on which Arab speaking place your from, or rather which dialect you speak
Yes, of course, but it seems that the Alawites (who are largely Syrian) pronounce the Rh as do the Egyptians (as Mr. Ghali is Egyptian...).
Perhaps that's not such a great distance today, but in the past, of course, it was... and the Alawites are not as wide-spread south of that village in northern Israel as the Egyptians have been and still are - of course, it is true that ancient Canaan was a province of ancient Egypt before the Israelites arrived... and Syria, long before being a distinct political entity as it is today, was a term used to identify the entire area (as in Levant or even Middle East but not to be confused with ASSYRIA)... hence the concept of "Greater Syria"... still, I doubt that any of the ancient Egyptian 'dialect' would have remained in the ancient Syrian dialect after this long!
As well, the Arabic language spoken on the streets and in the suks of the current Arab world, is NOT the same as the Arabic of the Koran and other literary works - thus, the differences between the Arabic spoken by your Moroccan friend and your Syrian friend - though when they read the Koran or pray the standard prayers, I suspect they sound the same (perhaps with a slightly different twang here or there).
Whoops, sorry - here I go again - but it is interesting, don't ya think, to compare the ancient to the modern and the regional to the bigger picture???
Shoshannah
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even under the current transliteration/transcription system, we don't spell Tao the way it sounds. Any ideas?There are / have been two main ways of rendering Mandarin Chinese pronunciation into English. Neither is strictly phonetic - it is a bit two-faced of any English speaker to complain about this, considering how non-fonetik Inglish iz... Whilst neither system of rendering Chinese is phonetic, each is internally consistent. This alone is easier than English - however mao and tao are pronounced, at least they rhyme, whereas cough and through don't. Enough... In both Wade-Giles (older rendering) and pinyin (more recent, introduced by the PRC post 1949, not sure exactly when) 'ao' is a compound vowel pronounced more or less like the vowel in the English 'how'. The t/d thing is not at all like l/r in Japanese. (Sorry, Fiberbabe!) In fact, it's the opposite. With l/r, the Japanese cannot distinguish between two sounds in English - they only hear one. With t/d (and also p/b, k/g), Chinese (OK, non-Mandarin Chinese, but the scholars who set up Wade-Giles had to accommodate them too) distinguished more sounds than the average English speaker or English orthography. This is where I start to struggle, but it's all to do with whether a consonant is hard or soft and whether it is voiced or unvoiced. For a (sort of, but totally non-scientifically based!) example, consider the number of British people who think Americans pronounce t as d. If we add it all up, we get three sounds: British t British d, American t American d The top one is not used in Mandarin, although I understand it is in other Chinese dialects. Wade-Giles, probably set up by the Brits and at a time when Mandarin was not so universal, used t, d, d' for these three sounds. Pinyin was set up later, at a time when American was more accepted as an accent. More significantly, it was set up by the Communists who had also decided to promote Mandarin above other Chinese dialects so that all Chinese would be able to talk to each other. They therefore had no use for a sound not in Mandarin. So they just used t and d for the last two sounds. So pinyin is less able to represent as many separate sounds, but much closer to 'normal' English pronunciation. ...I promise I will not try to explain this ever again on this board!  The short arnsa too wye we dohnt spel 'Tao' the way it sowndz iz that it iz ohnly wun ov menny wurds we dohn't spell how thay sownd. ( I couldn't even work out how to spell half those words phonetically using the poxy 26 characters we have to represent the sounds of English! )
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In reply to:
The t/d thing is not at all like l/r in Japanese. ... In fact, it's the opposite. With l/r, the Japanese cannot distinguish between two sounds in English - they only hear one.
We have a similar situation here, to whit, linguistically, Arabs (at least in this area) cannot distinguish between p/b and in fact, cannot make the 'p' sound at all, substituting the 'b' sound. So, instead of "police" we get "bolice" and so forth.
In fact, it is interesting how that changes words historically - for instance, in the north of Israel, we have a place called "Banias" - but at this place, you can see the remains of an ancient temple to the god Pan! Over the years, instead of Pan, the Arabs would say "Ban" and so the name of the place changed from "Panias" to "Banias" which is how it is now shown on ALL maps!
The same is true of the now-Arab city of Nablus (which was the Hebrew city of Shchem in ancient times, sometimes but incorrectly pronounced She-kem). Later, the name was changed to Neapolis (under the Roman occupation) and some time later when Arabs began to settle in the region (following the Muslim conquest in 638 CE and more under the Ottoman occupation and even more after the Jews began to return - from the mid-19th century and into the early 20th century), the city began to be called Nabolis... resulting in what we have today as Nablus!
In Hebrew, we have some letters that can be read as one sound or another, such as the bet & vet or pay & fay, BUT there are specific rules on when to use which sound. For instance, the real name of Hebron is Hevron (and it is a short 'e' as well and with the accent on the last syllable) as the 'vet' comes in the middle of the world rather than at the beginning (when it would most likely be pronounced with a 'b' sound).
Shoshannah
BTW - on transliterations - though there is somewhere an 'official' way to transliterate words from Hebrew & Arabic into English, here most people seem to prefer to do it in a way that is easiest for each person - thus, the street signs can be different from one block to the next or city to city or map to map!
Just one of the things that makes life here a bit more interesting than in some places!
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Carpal Tunnel
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The t/d thing is not at all like l/r in Japanese
The dental plosives represented by the letters <t> and <d> in English are differentiated mainly by the fact that the <d> is voiced and the <t> is unvoiced, that is, the vocal chords are vibrating during production of the <d> but not during the production of the <t>. A better example for demonstrating the difference would be with a sibilant pair such as <s> and <z>. Hold your fingers to your Adam's (or Eve's) apple and say, alternately "sssssssss" and "zzzzzzzzz". Notice that there is a vibration in your throat when you say the "zzzzzzzzz" that's not there when you say "sssssssss". The same thing is happening when you pronounce a <d> and a <t>. This is voicing When the sound is at the beginning of a word there will also be a little puff of air following a <t> that is not there following a <d>. Hold your hand in front of your mouth with the palm close to your lips. Say "town" and "down". Notice the puff of air at the beginning of the word "town" that's not there at the beginning of the word "down". This is aspiration. In English when a plosive comes at the beginning of a word if it is voiced it will also be unaspirated and, if unvoiced, it will be aspirated. In other languages this is not the case. The <t> of Tao is unvoiced and unaspirated. The <t> of Tai-chi (sometimes spelled T'ai-chi) is unvoiced and aspirated. The T' represents that sound. The English trained ear, not used to these differentiations hears the <t> of Tao as a <d>.
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Pooh-Bah
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In reply to:
...I promise I will not try to explain this ever again on this board!
Oh, Bridget, say it ain't so. I found that so illuminating.
And Faldage, your explanation of voiced/unvoiced and all was too.
Thank you all, for sharing your expertise and answering questions which have bothered me for years.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Thank you all, for sharing your expertise and answering questions which have bothered me for years.And a kingsize ditto from me on that!  One addendum for Bridget. My implicit complaint was not about phonetic inconsistency in Chinese, but in the work of those who developed the transcription systems.
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Hebrew vs. Arabic
Someone mentioned the word "Shibboleth" in some thread or other recently. If you check in the book of Judges, you find that 42,000 Ephraimites got the chop because of being unable to pronounce this word in the Hebrew manner, since they spoke another dialect. This is the first recorded instance of counter-intelligence or counter-insurgency.
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Carpal Tunnel
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I wonder if the Shibboleth/Sibboleth thing was dialect difference or an accent problem. Since Sin and Shin are basically the same letter, maybe it came down to a skedule/shedule difference, with a regional preference. After all, the Ephraimites understood the instruction, "say Shibboleth", and thought that they were complying. I'm sure that Australian Social Welfare officers will now use a similar test for welfare reciipients, to weed out Kiwis: "Say, 'fish and chips'" (trans-Tasman-in-joke-emoticon)
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Way I always understood it it was like the Japanese l/r thing. The wrong guys just couldn't pronounce the sh.
There was a Frisian/Hollander(?) thing. The Frisians would make the suspect say "brod, buter ond grene chiese, ond wat dat nat seyse ken is kin uprechte Friese." Or something like that. There were sounds in there that a Hollander (or whoever it was) just couldn't wrap a tongue around. I got the line from The Story of English by Mario Pei. He was demonstrating the closeness of English and Frisian.
I met a Frisian on the train from Flagstaff to Chicago once and spouted the phrase at him. After he recovered from the surprise of finding someone in America who knew any Frisian at all and corrected my pronunciation he gave me the full story.
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