Moroccan Arabic and deshi basara
Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2012 5:50 pm
In the film The Dark Knight Rises, there is a song that is sung by prisoners in a big hole in the ground when one of them tries to escape by climbing. The words are apparently Moroccan Arabic, and IIRC are translated in the film (and elsewhere on the net definitely) as 'he rises'. With my very scant knowledge of Moroccan Arabic and a quick search to see how natives say it is written, it looks like this is actually تيجي بسرعة, which I would tentatively transliterate as tayǧi b-sərʿa. The cognates of these two words in MSA and in the dialects I am familiar with (yaǧīʿ bi-surʿah and biǧi b-sərʿa) actually mean 'he comes quickly', and it seems likely that this is its meaning in Moroccan Arabic too. What I am interested in is a) whether these cognates do indeed have the same meaning in Moroccan Arabic, b) what the actual form is and c) whether the pronunciation is native. To me it sounds like they are singing [deʃi basɑra] whilst it probably should be [t̺iʒi bsrʕa] or something like that, but I'm not familiar enough with different dialects' phonologies.