# Lebanese Arabic: interdentals in MSA loans



## souminwé

Hello Arabic forum!

I've been trying to figure out how Lebanese Arabic deals with MSA words that have interdentals in them when mixing them into 3ammiyyah?
For example, I believe_ thawrah_ becomes _sawrah_, but what about less integrated words? Do they remain interdentals or are they approximated with s/z? Would maintaining interdentals from words borrowed from MSA be considered pretensious?

Thank you for your help


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## إسكندراني

In all dialects, most people don't even know how to distinguish between certain letters, like s&th in lebanese.


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## Arabus

In Syria and Lebanon (also in Egypt) the interdentals become dental in native words, but they become s/z in words borrowed from Standard Arabic. You can pronounce them correctly but this is unnecessary.


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## clevermizo

souminwé said:


> I've been trying to figure out how Lebanese Arabic deals with MSA words that have interdentals in them when mixing them into 3ammiyyah?
> For example, I believe_ thawrah_ becomes _sawrah_, but what about less integrated words? Do they remain interdentals or are they approximated with s/z? Would maintaining interdentals from words borrowed from MSA be considered pretensious?



I think if you are urban Lebanese and make sure to say _mathalan _all the time, instead of _masalan_, that could come off as pretentious, but I know people that do as much. Regardless, I don't think it would come off as pretentious from a non-native speaker. When I use standard Arabic words in speech (such as ثورة) I use the ث and ذ sounds and do not convert them to س and ز sounds, and no one has corrected me to do otherwise. I think as a non-native, it's a valid strategy.


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## شيري

Hi,
I was wondering how this works with the tendency to use t instead of th as in كثير=كتير. Is it that in some words the th turns into t and in others into s? Is there any systematicity to that? What happens with loanwords from other languages (e.g., English)? Do they remain th, change to s or change to t?


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## إسكندراني

There is no solid rule; regard every word as a unique case. It's one reason why speaking a dialect fluently is probably harder for foreigners than MSA.


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## clevermizo

شيري said:


> Hi,
> I was wondering how this works with the tendency to use t instead of th as in كثير=كتير. Is it that in some words the th turns into t and in others into s? Is there any systematicity to that? What happens with loanwords from other languages (e.g., English)? Do they remain th, change to s or change to t?



In general it's as Arabus mentioned. The 't' is used colloquial words, while the 's' (or proper ث) is used in learned vocabulary from standard Arabic. There are exceptions of course. كتير is not a word of "high" vocabulary, but a very ordinary dialect word. 

Words from other languages wouldn't follow this paradigm. If someone is comfortable with the _th_ sound in English they will pronounce it in a foreign word, while if not they might substitute the sound.


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## Arabus

In Aleppo now most people say _kazzab _for "he lied," but if you go to the old town and listen to some barely literate speakers you will hear them say _kaddab _(which is similar to the Egyptian pronunciation). Even my late grandparents used to say _kaddab _instead of _kazzab_, but not my parents. I don't know why people changed the pronunciation of this verb but I assume that it is part of the general "standardization" trend that has been going on for so long. I was so young when my grandparents were still alive but I can still remember that they used many words that my parents never used. For example, the verb _karaa _which means "to rent." 

I noticed that even my (and my siblings') speech is different from my parents. For example, my parents say _7efle _for "party" and _seyyaara _for "car," but I (and my siblings) say _7afle _and _sayyaara_. I don't know the reason but I assume that it is because I and my siblings started hearing MSA in cartoons at a very young age, unlike my parents who actually did not watch TV in their childhood.


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## شيري

So would you say that the th-->t vs. th-->s is also related to speakers' education and age? That is, are the higher register words more likely to change to s because they're used mostly by those with higher education?

I can see how exposure to Classical Arabic might explain the sayyaara and 7afle changes, but are s and z closer to Classical Arabic than the t and d?

So does everyone think that there's no systematicity in how the th is pronounced in loanwords from foreign languages, and that it would actually be maintained if the speaker is capable of pronouncing it?


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## Arabus

Other examples:

ذكر : many people now pronounce this _zakar_, but the original pronunciation was _dakar _(still in use by some people of certain socioeconomic status). On the other hand, أنثى is generally pronounced _entaaye_ (or more properly _enteeye_); but I think _unsaa _is also becoming common. It does not feel right to say _entaaye_/_enteeye _in a formal setting.

آذار : most people pronounce it _aazaar_, but some old grannies will pronounce it _aadaar_.


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## إسكندراني

شيري said:


> So would you say that the th-->t vs. th-->s is also related to speakers' education and age? That is, are the higher register words more likely to change to s because they're used mostly by those with higher education?
> 
> I can see how exposure to Classical Arabic might explain the sayyaara and 7afle changes, but are s and z closer to Classical Arabic than the t and d?
> 
> So does everyone think that there's no systematicity in how the th is pronounced in loanwords from foreign languages, and that it would actually be maintained if the speaker is capable of pronouncing it?


No; it sounds pretentious if I maintain foreign pronunciation. I have to 'Egyptianise' (* ejebsheyanayz) foreign terms just for people to understand often. And equivalently, when on the phone to Morocco, make it sound more north-african french D).


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## clevermizo

شيري said:


> I can see how exposure to Classical Arabic might explain the sayyaara and 7afle changes, but are s and z closer to Classical Arabic than the t and d?



Not phonologically (t/d preserve place but lose manner of articulation; s/z preserve manner but lose place of articulation), but they are _perceived_ as being closer to _th_ ث and _dh_ ذ and that's what matters here.


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## Arabus

The Arabic fricatives are pretty strong compared to fricatives in other languages. They are loud with a lot of air coming out.

However, people in North Africa are more likely to substitute the dentals for the MSA interdentals. I don't know why but it may be because of different articulation.


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## jenniferlb

clevermizo said:


> In general it's as Arabus mentioned. The 't' is used colloquial words, while the 's' (or proper ث) is used in learned vocabulary from standard Arabic. There are exceptions of course. كتير is not a word of "high" vocabulary, but a very ordinary dialect word.
> 
> Words from other languages wouldn't follow this paradigm. If someone is comfortable with the _th_ sound in English they will pronounce it in a foreign word, while if not they might substitute the sound.


Hello. I'm 4 years late but I hope I can still get an answer.
What brought me here is actually an observation about the Lebanese dialect.
It seems to me that exceptions are far too frequent in that dialect, because an overwhelming majority of the words where this substitution occurs seem to be MSA words for me. However, this could be because the idea of what is or isn't an MSA word is unclear to me. So could you maybe define what you mean by 'colloquial' words and 'learned vocabulary'?
For instance, would it be correct to say that ياخد is a colloquial word but زكي is an MSA word? [because the Lebanese root ياخد is different from the MSA root يأخذ, whereas زكي is the same in Lebanese and MSA]
Thanks!


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## analeeh

The typical explanation is that obviously at some point historically, all of these interdental sounds merged with dental ones in most urban Levantine dialects (other non-urban dialects maintained the interdentals). So in the hypothetical pure, non-MSA influenced Levantine of a few hundred years ago, you ended up with e.g. _kadhdhab > kaddab_, _thalaath > talaat_, etc etc. Then when speakers of this dialect heard people using MSA (presumably even in the old days, in the mosque, and later obviously on TV) they started to imitate the prestigious interdental pronunciation, which to them sounded like s and z. So in some higher-register, more formal or more academic words, you got interdental pronunciations (generally the same words that you see other things like the retention of otherwise-dropped short vowels and qaaf, like ثقافة). Likewise, some words, like مثلا and ثانيًا, started to have two variants, one with a dental stop (_matalan, taaniyan_) and one with a fricative (_masalan, saaniyan_). The latter sound more educated or formal.

As MSA became more and more prominent in everybody's lives with the advent of TV and mass education, a lot of words which were in fact not very high-register at all started to develop - and in some cases be replaced by as the normal alternative - forms with s, z or Z. _Matalan_ (although it's a very common word and is still found in some dialects) sounds sort of odd to me, as does _kaddab_ (used by old people). There are some very normal words I've never heard a dental stop variant for (e.g. _tzakkar_). Some of these might be explained by the presence of more common synonyms which have maybe been replaced by MSA vocabulary (I've never heard _daki_ for _zaki_, but then there are a number of more colloquial synonyms like _shaaTer_) but I've never heard anyone say, for example, _ida_ for _iza_ (إذا). All of this throws a very significant spanner in the works as far as the 'MSA WORDS HAVE S Z AND COLLOQUIAL WORDS HAVE T D' thing even as a rule of thumb. 

Most or all of the words which have s, z or Z can be pronounced with interdentals, but this might sound pretentious or odd under some circumstances (especially in colloquial speech). Using interdentals in words like _tlaat_ on the other hand will make you sound in most contexts like you're speaking a rural dialect (and thus, probably, like a bit of a hick). Using t or d in most of them will make you sound either outright wrong or very old. An interesting side-effect of all of this, incidentally, is that a lot of speakers of dialects which natively have interdentals (for example in _thleth_ or whatever they have for 'three') pronounce MSA words like ثقافة or بتذكر WITHOUT interdentals - as _saqaafe_ or _bitzakkar_ - because they imitate the prestige dialect pronunciation.

As far as your learning goes - I'm afraid you really just have to learn it on a word-by-word basis. One of the myths that gets sold to you as a learner of an Arabic dialect is that you can just apply a small set of transformations to MSA and end up with colloquial speech - but unfortunately, dialects have rules of their own, and vocabulary items are not learnt by natives as MSA + transformation but as items in their own right (in fact for natives it's the other way around, a lot of people sometimes have to guess at the MSA equivalent to colloquial lexis through the application of similar processes, and they sometimes get it wrong). But it's probably safe, as a beginner, to use interdentals in every MSA word that has them (nobody is going to think you're being pretentious), except for the obvious small collection of very common words you will learn from your textbook (like _tlaate_ and _tmaani_). From speaking to natives you can work out where to go from there.


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## apricots

Does anybody have an explanation for why the ث retains its pronunciation in some Palestinian words? For example, I've been taught to say Jeysh ath-Thuwar whereas Egyptian and Syrian speakers both say Suwar. Is it possibly because education has a stronger history in Palestine?


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## analeeh

It seems to be that way. Palestinians seem to have th in more words. That said, there are also plenty of Syrians (now perhaps more than previously) who say _thawra_ and _thuwwaar_.


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## tounsi51

I think this is bedouin influence in the case of Palestinian.


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