Jordanian Arabic Phonology and Morphology - Essay Example

Jordanian Arabic Phonology and Morphology Introduction This paper makes an attempt to compare two languages- Jordanian Arabic and English- from two different linguistic perspectives: morphological and phonological. These languages belong to two different families: English to the family of Indo-European languages, and Jordanian Arabic is a dialect of Arabic- a Semitic language. Some of the differences- both structural and representational- have been looked at in the two sections that follow, as well as some similarities and common features that perhaps signify the universal elements in the deep structure of these languages. Phonology The first of the fundamental differences between the phonetics of Jordanian Arabic and English is the absence of certain sounds in the phonemic inventory of each of the languages as compared to the other. To start with, let us look at certain sounds that occur in English, but not in Jordanian Arabic: The voiceless plosive /p/ is one of the consonant sounds which do not exist in most of the Semitic languages. Instead there is a voiced sound /b/ that native speakers of these languages use both in their speech and as second-language learners of English. Another such sound is the English voiced fricative /v/ which doesn’t exist in the phonemic inventory of Jordanian Arabic. The third is the consonant [č]. On the other hand, there are certain Jordanian Arabic consonants which do not occur in English. These are the voiceless alveolar stop [tˤ] (ta’) the voiced alveolar stop [ðˤ] (thaad) the voiceless grooved fricative [s]ˤ (saad) the voiced grooved fricative [zˤ] (zaa) the velar voiceless central fricative [x] (khaa’) the glottal stop [ʔˤ] (aein) the pharyngeal voiceless central fricative [ħ] (haa’). A major difference in the syllabic inventory of the two languages is in the presence of the super-heavy syllable of the form CVVC in Arabic and its dialects. This does not exist in the syllable-structure in English. Although there are many other points of difference between English and Jordanian Arabic from the phonological point of view, including rules of transformation and optimality theoretical constraints, the discussion has been restricted here to these basic points of difference. Morphology In this section I shall compare the two languages- English and Jordanian Arabic- in terms of the morphology that characterizes them. One of the principal characteristics of Semitic morphology is its being non-linear or non-concatenative: instead of morphemes being placed linearly before the stem as prefixes and suffixes as in English, the morphemic structure of Semitic words is characterized by two or more morphemes interwoven within each other in a discontinuous fashion. One morpheme is inserted into another in certain slots of the word-stem structure. Neither the root-morpheme nor the morpheme to which it is attached (also called the template) free. They are both bound morphemes and only when a certain root and a template merge a definite word is completely specified phonologically, morphologically and semantically. (Shimron, Joseph, 2002) Some of the differences that inflectional morphemes present in the two languages are: Jordanian Arabic has second person singular pronouns (enta, enti) and plural (entum/ entoo originally antum) for both sexes, while English has only ‘you’ for second person pronoun, both singular and plural. In the case of third-person pronouns, English has he/she/it for singular while Jordanian Arabic has a dichotomy: objects ending with “taa’ murboota” take the pronoun “hiyeh” and rest take “howa” There is only one third person plural pronoun (hummeh – originally hum) for both sexes and objects in Jordanian Arabic like in English. In the case of the tenses, while the past, present and the future tenses are present in both the languages, Jordanian Arabic doesn’t have the perfect aspect while English does. The morphemes that affix to the rotts in Jordanian Arabic are: Present/ Progressive aspect: “ʔˤm-” “b- (m)/ eb- (f)” Future aspect: “raħ” The degrees of comparison of adjectives in Jordanian Arabic are morphed by affixes as follows: the superlative adjectives are shown by the prefix ‘al’ at the beginning of an adjective which is not more that 4 characters. The comparative degree is indicated by just omitting the ‘al’ before the adjective. The following table gives us a picture of what we had discussed at the beginning of this section. In Jordanian Arabic, two or more morphemes are interwoven discontinuously to form a word. The table here illustrates the phenomenon. FREE MORPHEME BOUND MORPHEME Boy Walad Boys (suffix plural -s) Awlād (prefix + infix) Table tˤawleh Tables (suffix plural -s) tˤawlat (suffix) Walks biyemshi walked (suffix) Mashā (infix + suffix) Eats ʔˤm bokel Running (suffix) biyokel (prefix + infix) Saed Saed Saed ‘s (suffix) La Saed (prefix) Derivational morphemes: the use of affixes in derivational morphology in Jordanian Arabic has some parallels to offer when compared with English. The following might illustrate: The prefixes attached to verbs, adjectives, etc Un/ dis/ not – “mu/ mesh” e.g.: 1. Unhappy  mesh farhan 2. Disorganized  mu emratab Re – “ʔˤd” e.g.: Rewrite  ʔˤid el kitabeh Pre – “ma abel” e.g.: Prehistory  ma abel el tārix The following are examples of derivational suffixes in Jordanian Arabic with their English counterparts. buyer (-er)  shari conversation (-ation)  muhadathat national (-al)  watani American (-n)  amriki Jordanian (-ian)  ordoni European (-an)  orobi Administrative (-tive)  edari Conclusion It can be seen from the above that there are several aspects of Jordanian Arabic- both phonological and morphological which are radically different from those in English. There are some aspects which are similar too. However, the wide range of study that has been done so far in these areas and the ongoing research has many more aspects to discuss, apart from the few this paper has attempted to look into. Bibliography Al-Ani, S. Ed. (1978). Readings in Arabic Linguistuics. Indiana: Bloomington, Indiana University Linguistics Club Clark, John & Yallop, Colin.(1990). An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Jensen, John T. (1990). Morphology: Word Structure in Generative Grammar. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. McCarthy, John J. (1985). Formal Problems in Semitic Phonology and Morphology. New York: Garland Publishing Shimron, Joseph. (2002). Semitic Languages: Are they really root-based? Language Processing and Acquisition in Languages of Semitic, Root-based, Morphology. Ed. Joseph Shimron. p.4-5. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Watson, Janet C.E. (2002). The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic. New York: Oxford University Press. Read More