Varieties of Arabic: Encyclopedia II - Varieties of Arabic - Morphological and syntactic variation

Varieties of Arabic - Morphological and syntactic variation

All dialects, sedentary and Bedouin, share the following innovations from Classical Arabic (CA):

• The dominant order is subject-verb rather than verb-subject.
• Verbal agreement between subject and object is always complete.

• In CA, there was no number agreement between subject and verb when the subject was third-person and the subject followed the verb.

• Loss of case distinctions.
• Loss of original mood distinctions other than the indicative and imperative (i.e. subjunctive, jussive, energetic I, energetic II).

• The dialects differ in how exactly the new indicative was developed from the old forms. The sedentary dialects adopted the old subjunctive forms (feminine /ī/, masculine plural /ū/), while many of the Bedouin dialects adopted the old indicative forms (feminine /īna/, masculine plural /ūna/).
• The sedentary dialects developed new mood distinctions; see below.

• Loss of dual marking everywhere except on nouns.

• A frozen dual persists as the regular plural marking of a small number of words that normally come in pairs (e.g. eyes, hands, parents).
• In addition, a productive dual marking on nouns exists in most dialects. (Tunisian and Moroccan Arabic are exceptions.) This dual marking differs syntactically from the frozen dual in that it cannot take possessive suffixes. In addition, it differs morphologically from the frozen dual in various dialects, such as Levantine Arabic.
• The productive dual differs from CA in that its use is optional and factitive, whereas the use of the CA dual was mandatory even in cases of implicitly dual reference.
• The CA dual was marked not only on nouns by also on verbs, adjectives, pronouns and demonstratives.

• Development of an analytic genitive construction to rival the constructed genitive.

• Compare the similar development of shel in Modern Hebrew.
• The Bedouin dialects make the least use of the analytic genitive. Moroccan Arabic makes the most use of it, to the extent that the constructed genitive is no longer productive, and used only in certain relatively frozen constructions.

• The indirect object, marked in CA by the preposition /la-/ followed by an enclitic pronoun, has become fused onto the end of the verb.
• The relative pronoun is no longer inflected. (In CA, it took gender, number and case endings.)
• Pronominal clitics ending in a short vowel moved the vowel before the consonant.

• Hence, second singular /-ak/ and /-ik/ rather than /-ka/ and /-ki/; third singular masculine /-uh/ rather than /-hu/.
• Similarly, the feminine plural verbal marker /-na/ became /-an/.
• Because of the absolute prohibition in all Arabic dialects against having two vowels in hiatus, the above changes occurred only when a consonant preceded the ending. When a vowel preceded, the forms either remained as-is or lost the final vowel, becoming /-k/, /-ki/, /-h/ and /-n/, respectively. Combined with other phonetic changes, this resulted in multiple forms for each clitic (up to three), depending on the phonetic environment.
• The verbal markers /-tu/ (first singular) and /-ta/ (second singular masculine) both became /-t/, while second singular feminine /-ti/ remained.
• The forms given here were the original forms, and have often suffered various changes in the modern dialects.
• All of these changes were triggered by the loss of final short vowels (see below).

• Various simplifications have occurred in the range of variation in verbal paradigms.

• Third-weak verbs with radical /w/ and radical /y/ have merged in the form I perfect tense. (They had already merged in CA, except in form I.)
• Form I perfect fa9ula verbs have disappeared, often merging with fa9ila.
• Doubled verbs now have the same endings as third-weak verbs.
• Some endings of third-weak verbs have been replaced by those of the strong verbs (or vice-versa, in some dialects).

All dialects except some Bedouin dialects of the Arabian peninsula share the following innovations from CA:

• Loss of the inflected passive (i.e., marked through internal vowel change) in finite verb forms.

• New passives have often been developed by co-opting the original reflexive formations in CA, particularly verb forms V, VI and VII. (In CA these were derivational, not inflectional, as neither their existence nor exact meaning could be depended upon; however, they have often been incorporated into the inflectional system, especially in more innovative sedentary dialects.)
• Hassaniya Arabic contains a newly developed inflected passive that looks somewhat like the old CA passive.

• Loss of the indefinite /n/ suffix (tanwiin) on nouns.

• When this marker still appears, it is variously /an/, /in/, or /en/.
• In some Bedouin dialects it still marks indefiniteness on any noun, although this is optional and often used only in oral poetry.
• In other dialects it marks indefiniteness on post-modified nouns (by adjectives or relative clauses).
• All Arabic dialects preserve a form of the CA adverbial accusative /an/ suffix, which was originally a tanwiin marker.

• Loss of verb form IV, the causative.

• Verb form II sometimes gives causatives, but it is not productive.

• Uniform use of /i/ in imperfect verbal prefixes.

• CA had /u/ before form II, III and IV active, and before all passives, and /a/ elsewhere.
• Some Bedouin dialects in the Arabian peninsula have uniform /a/.
• Najdi Arabic has /a/ when the following vowel is /i/, and /i/ when the following vowel is /a/.

All sedentary dialects share the following additional innovations:

• Loss of a separately distinguished feminine plural in verbs, pronouns and demonstratives. This is usually lost in adjectives as well.
• Development of a new indicative-subjunctive distinction.

• The indicative is marked by a prefix, while the subjunctive lacks this.
• The prefix is /b/ or /bi/ in Egyptian Arabic and Levantine Arabic, but /ka/ or /ta/ in Moroccan Arabic.
• Tunisian Arabic lacks an indicative prefix, and therefore does not have this distinction, along with at least some varieties of Algerian and Libyan Arabic.

• Loss of /h/ in the third-person masculine enclitic pronoun, when attached to a word ending in a consonant.

• The form is usually /u/ or /o/ in sedentary dialects, but /ah/ or /ih/ in Bedouin dialects.
• After a vowel, the bare form /h/ is used, but in many sedentary dialects the /h/ is lost here as well. In Egyptian Arabic, for example, this pronoun is marked in this case only by lengthening of the final vowel and concomitant stress shift onto it.

In addition, the following innovations are characteristic of many or most sedentary dialects:

• Agreement (verbal, adjectival) with inanimate plurals is plural, rather than feminine singular, as in CA.
• Development of a circumfix negative marker on the verb, involving a prefix /ma-/ and a suffix /-ʃ/.

• In combination with the fusion of the indirect object and the development of new mood markers, this results in verbal complexes that are approaching agglutinative languages in their complexity.
• An example from Egyptian Arabic is

• /ma-bi-t-gib-u-ha-lnā-ʃ/
• [negation]-[indicative]-[2nd.person.subject]-bring-[plural.subject]-her-to.us-[negation]
• "You (plural) aren't bringing her to us."

• (NOTE: Versteegh glosses /bi/ as continuous.)

• In Egyptian, Tunisian and Moroccan Arabic, the distinction between active and passive participles has disappeared except in form I and in some Classical borrowings.

• These dialects tend to use form V and VI active participles as the passive participles of forms II and III.

Other notable innovations:

• In the imperfect, Maghreb Arabic has replaced first person singular /ʔ-/ with /n-/, and the first person plural, originally marked by /n-/ alone, is also marked by the /-u/ suffix of the other plural forms.
• Moroccan Arabic has greatly rearranged the system of verbal derivation, so that the traditional system of forms I through X is not applicable without some stretching. It would be more accurate to describe its verbal system as consisting of two major types, triliteral and quadriliteral, each with a mediopassive variant marked by a prefixal /t-/ or /tt-/.

• The triliteral type encompasses traditional form I verbs (strong: /ktʔ/ "write"; geminate: /ʃəmm/ "smell"; hollow: /biʕ/ "sell", /gul/ "say", /xaf/ "fear"; weak /ʃri/ "buy", /ħbu/ "crawl", /bda/ "begin"; irregular: /kul/-/kla/ "eat", /ddi/ "take away", /ʒi/ "come").
• The quadriliteral type encompasses strong [CA form II, quadriliteral form I]: /sˤrˤfəq/ "slap", /hrrəs/ "break", /hrnən/ "speak nasally"; hollow-2 [CA form III, non-CA]: /ʕayən/ "wait", /gufəl/ "inflate", /mixəl/ "eat" (slang); hollow-3 [CA form VIII, IX]: /xtˤarˤ/ "choose", /ħmarˤ/ "redden"; weak [CA form II weak, quadriliteral form I weak]: /wrri/ "show", /sˤqsˤi/ "inquire"; hollow-2-weak [CA form III weak, non-CA weak]: /sali/ "end", /ruli/ "roll", /tiri/ "shoot"; irregular: /sˤifətˤ/-/sˤafətˤ/ "send".
• There are also a certain number of quinquiliteral or longer verbs, of various sorts, e.g. weak: /pidˤali/ "pedal", /blˤani/ "scheme, plan", /fanti/ "dodge, fake"; remnant CA form X: /stəʕməl/ "use", /stahəl/ "deserve"; diminutive: /t-birˤʒəz/ "act bourgeois", /t-biznəs/ "deal in drugs".
• Note that those types corresponding to CA forms VIII and X are rare and completely unproductive, while some of the non-CA types are productive. At one point, form IX significantly increased its productivity over CA, and there are perhaps 50-100 of these verbs currently, mostly stative but not necessarily referring to colors or bodily defects. However, this type is no longer very productive.
• Due to the merging of short /a/ and /i/, most of these types show no stem difference between perfect and imperfect, which is probably why the languages has incorporated new types so easily.

• Egyptian Arabic, probably under the influence of Coptic, puts the demonstrative pronoun after the noun (/al-X da/ "this X" instead of CA /hāðā l-X/) and leaves interrogative pronouns in situ rather than fronting them, as in other dialects.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Morphological and syntactic variation", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki