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Two Problems in Arabic Phonology

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Two Problems in Arabic Phonology 8. TWO PROBLEMS IN ARABIC PHONOLOGY CHARLES A. FERGUSON 1.1. In a recent article B. Hunter Smeaton takes up again some of the problems of the phonological analysis of Arabic raised in part by Cantineau's manual of Damascus Arabic, my review of it in Lan­ guage, and Cantineau's reply article in Word. l Smeaton's article is thoughtful and clearly presented, and it may serve to clarifY certain aspects of the problems, especially for the non-specialist. It fails, however, to include certain data crucial for fully satisfactory solu­ tions. Careful consideration of this material led me some years ago to definite conclusions on several of the problems. Unfortunately, how­ ever, these conclusions have never been published in substantive arti­ cles where they could be examined and evaluated by other linguists, but have appeared only occasionally and piecemeal in reviews or comments on the work of others. Complete treatment of the prob­ lems in their appropriate contexts must await full-scale descriptions of various Arabic dialects as well as more detailed historical studies, but it may be useful, because of the general theoretical interest of the problems, to explain my views and the reasons for them. The two problems chosen by Smeaton for explication are as good as any to provide a general orientation: 1. long mid vowels e 0 vs. diph­ thongs try auP and 2. the final "virtual -h." In both these cases the issue is not, as Smeaton suggests, whether certain morphological or diachronic data should have been considered in arriving at an analy­ sis-the morphemic and historical material presented by Smeaton is well known and accepted-but rather how to understand the phono­ logical systems as they now function. Also, the issue is not whether linguists have taken sufficient account of the influence of Classical Arabic on the speaker of Arabic today, which Smeaton questions, but rather how to provide an analysis which will be adequate for all I The four references in chronological order are: J. Cantineau with Y. Helbaoui, Manuel elimentaire d'arahe oriental (parter de Damas). Paris, 1953. C.A. Ferguson, review of preceding, lAnguage 30. 564-70 (1954). J. Cantineau, "The Phonemic System of Damascus Arabic", Word 12. 117-24 (1956). B.H. Smeaton, "Some Problems in the Description of Arabic," Word 12. 357--68 (1956). 2 The word "diphthong" is used here simply as a convenient term for the sequences qy and a:w (as opposed to long vowels eo), with no technical meaning beyond that. 116 CHARLES A. FERGUSON utterances of the native speaker whether colloquial, Classical, or, as is very often the case, a mixture of the two. Before proceeding to the explanatory sections, I should like to make clear my admiration and respect for Cantineau so that this article will not be regarded as an attack on him. I have consistendy re­ garded Cantineau as one of the world's outstanding scholars in the field of Arabic dialect studies and as a pioneer in the application of structural methods to Semitic linguistic studies. I believe I have made this clear both in occasional exchanges of letters with him over a period of about ten years, and also in print. My disagreements are therefore not personal, and I hope the viewpoint expressed here will be examined seriously by his colleagues and students. 1.1 First, the long mid vowels. Classical Arabic (hereafter ClAr), as described by the grammarians and as represented in the tradi­ tional orthography, has three long vowels and three short vowels ii z u a i u and is often cited3 as an example of the simplest kind of "triangular" vowel system. Although there are indications4 that some pronunciations of the Classical language had four or even five long vowels, the bulk of the evidence is in favor of the simple triangular system, and no modem dialect, to my knowledge, requires any other analysis of the Classical to explain the diachronic developments. The long vowels of ClAr cannot be analyzed as vowel plus semi­ vowel for the reasons set forth by Cantineau and Smeaton: z = ry and u = UW, but ii '* a', ah, try, or aw, and there is no other entity available as a possible second element of ii. Also, it is not possible to equate y and w with short i and u and at the same time regard the long vowels as geminates as done by Cantineau in his description of ClAr phonology5 for the reasons set forth by Smeaton: although z = ry and u = uw and in general i and u precede consonants and y and w precede vowels, yet z '* yi and u '* wu and it is even possible, though quite difficult, to find minimal pairs. Smeaton's observations on this point are quite correct, and I wrote to Cantineau to the same effect immediately after reading his Esquisse. In his reply he merely pointed out that the functional load of such a contrast would 3 Cf. N.S. Troubetzkoy, Principes de phonologie, tr. J. Cantineau, 114 (Paris, 1949); R. Jakobson, G. Fant, and M. Halle, Preliminaries to speech analYsis, 34 (Cambridge, Mass., 1952). C.F. Hockett, Manual qfphonology, 84 (Baltimore, 1953) even attributed this to Iraqi Arabic, which is surprising, since his authority seems to be M.Y. Van Wagoner, Spoken Iraqi Arabic (Madison, 1943), which gives four long vowels; my review of the latter (Word 7. 276-8 [1951]) suggested five for this dialect. 4 Cf. C. Rabin, Ancient West-Arabian, 105-21 (London, 1951). 5 J. Cantineau, "Esquisse d'une phono1ogie de l'arabe classique", BSL 43. 93-140 (1946), hereafter Esquisse. This study, in spite of minor flaws, is a landmark in Semitic linguistic studies. .
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