zompist bboard

Since I'm studying Arabic and specifically interested in the Gulf dialects, I'm gonna write briefly on the phonology of Kuwaiti Arabic after being here for a while for any of those interested, I'll try and comment on how it differs from Modern Standard Arabic and other dialects (or what I know of ot...

I was wondering what exactly do pharyngealised vowels sound like? Are they just a vowel with a pharyngeal fricative/approximant after it or what? Which languages use them?

It is yaa-miim, most people write it like that when handwriting too (with the two dots becoming a line, of course). It's not just nastaliq...

Yeah, the Egyptian 3ayn (and pharyngealised consonants) are definitely a lot 'weaker' compared to the Khaleji (Gulf) dialects which I'm used to. The 3ayn in the Gulf definitely sounds more epiglottal to my ears, or has a stronger constriction of the throat than in Egyptian, especially at the end of ...

Me looking rather cheerful:

And also, it would be great to see some more emphasis on 3amiyya forms; I'm personally more interested in khaliiji due to possible career prospects, but I'd love to know more about misriyya as well. Maybe you should consider making a different thread for that, since fus7a is effectively a different...

Arabic /q/ is often [ɢ] in some Gulf dialects.

PD: Maybe it has nothing to do with MBM’s, but: In Zhang Yimou’s film “Keep cool” there’s a scene where a man calls a girl’s name many times. The subtitles showed her name as “An Hong”, but he was saying something like “/ŋan/ Hong” or “/nan/ Hong”... That's probably just a dialectal difference, man...

rickardspaghetti wrote:Is that lipstick?

Nope...I just altered the contrast a bit

Here is one of me pretending to be an Arab from the Gulf:

I'm guessing [pɕi] is a result of strong palatalisation and aspiration occuring together. This is quite common in Mandarin too, and happens in other environments. I remember a non Mandarin speaker asking me why /pa ta/ sound like [pxa txa].

Here's one of me smoking shisha and one next to some old canon (I think) thing.

Apparantly in Maasai, a number of nouns cannot be gramatically possessed, so how does such a language express possession of these nouns? For example, is possession of non-possessable nouns shown by some sort of preposition like 'the land to me' (my land)? Or maybe by some sort of relativiser 'the la...

I speak Scouse (although I speak a much weaker version outside Liverpool) which has some interesting features such as /t k/ -> [ts x], the vowel typically represented by 'er ir' is [I:] or [e:]. /r/ is a flap in all positions.

I'm quite sure Arabic's /q/ is also something closer to [q͡ʡ], as it has a quality which sounds further back than uvular. When I have pronounced it as a pure /q/ my Arabic speaking friends have told me to make it 'heavier'.

陈楚生 - 有没有人告诉你 [Chen ChuSheng - You meiyou ren gaosu ni]

I was just wondering, how did Verdurian acquite the long a? I think it was from a stressed 'au' in Cadhinor? Also, isn't it strange for a language to have one long vowel which is phonemic when length is not distinctive in the other vowels? Wouldn't the vowel merge with short /a/ over time? I was pla...