# The historical pronunciation of Arabic ضاد/ض



## Abu Rashid

Moderator's Note:

This post beginning a side discussion of the historical pronunciation(s) of ض in Arabic was split from this thread about Proto-Semitic sibilants.



			
				ma7adan said:
			
		

> I generally agree with the [ɬ] hypothesis for Arabic [ʃ], which explains the letter ض quite nicely.



What does ض have to do with the sibilants?


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> What does ض have to do with the sibilants?


All native speakers I asked confirmed to me that the production of ض contains elements of a lateral sibilant. ض counts as a "side tone letter".


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## ma7adan

Abu Rashid said:


> What does ض have to do with the sibilants



Well, according to at least one theory, Arabic ض is derived from a pharyngealized [ɬ] sound. The un-pharyngealized version of that phoneme is conjectured to have become the [ʃ] in contemporary Arabic. In which case, the ض is the emphatic counterpart of a sibilant phoneme, by today's pronunciation. Whether you agree with this or not is a different matter. I personally find it plausible, given the unique status accorded to the letter ض by Arabs themselves, as well as the orthographic derivation from ص which is an emphatic sibilant. In any case, we can be pretty sure ض wasn't always an emphatic [d].


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## clevermizo

ma7adan said:


> Well, according to at least one theory, Arabic ض is derived from a pharyngealized [ɬ] sound.



This is Sibawayh's description of the consonant and I believe he also considered it voiced. The voiced, lateral, emphatic fricative was considered especially unique which is what lead to the nickname أهل الضاد. One could hardly imagine the modern [ḍ] sound as being considered especially unique  .


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## WadiH

Mizo,

How would you describe this sound to a lay person?  A mix of ظ and ل?


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## berndf

Today you find [ɬ] e.g. in Welsh. It sounds like a mixture of "sh" and "l". If you google for videos about the "Welch double L" you'll find many samples. I can't provide you with links here. This is how linguist think a Proto-Semitic s2 sounded link, maybe with plosive, "t" in the beginning.

ض is the emphatic ("dark") version of s2, like ص is the emphatic version of س.


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## Abu Rashid

clevermizo said:
			
		

> One could hardly imagine the modern [ḍ] sound as being considered especially unique



Which other language has such a sound?

The other sound you are describing seems to be the way it is in some MSA languages, and also how it was supposed to have been in Ge'ez. Given the proximity of those two regions to the Arabs, I hardly think they'd have been considered to be the unique users of such a sound then...



			
				ma7adan said:
			
		

> as well as the orthographic derivation from ص which is an emphatic sibilant.



The orthographic derivation has more to do with the mergers of phonemes in North-West Semitic languages than it does to do with how they sound in Arabic. The Arabic alphabet was created through a process which involved borrowing symbols from mostly Nabataean Aramaic script, and in those NW languages, letters like ع/غ ط/ظ etc. had merged together, and so the Arabs used the same shape, and later distinguished them with dots. The problem here of course is that in Aramaic ض had merged with ع not ص but I don't know if that's the case with Nabataean Aramaic, with Hebrew it was merged with ص.


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## clevermizo

Wadi Hanifa said:


> Mizo,
> 
> How would you describe this sound to a lay person?  A mix of ظ and ل?



I'm not really sure how I'd describe. Maybe more like a mixture of ش，ظ　and ل if that's possible to conceive.



berndf said:


> Today you find [ɬ] e.g. in Welsh. It sounds like a mixture of "sh" and "l". If you google for videos about the "Welch double L" you'll find many samples. I can't provide you with links here. This is how linguist think a Proto-Semitic s2 sounded link, maybe with plosive, "t" in the beginning.
> 
> ض is the emphatic ("dark") version of s2, like ص is the emphatic version of س.



Yes exactly, which is why ض　is relevant to the sibilant phoneme discussion.



Abu Rashid said:


> Which other language has such a sound?



Plenty. ḍ is just an unaspirated, velarized [d] sound. While not all languages possess a contrast between velarized or pharyngealized and plain consonants, to the untrained ear, ض　just sounds like a d and I've experienced many a learner of Arabic not being able to quite tell the difference between ض　and د　except on the effect on the surrounding vowels.

If they heard the lateral fricative, which is much rarer in the world's general inventory of sounds than [d], it would stand out even if mispronounced. Of course it depends on the speaker's language background. Obviously if someone speaks a South Arabian language that has lateral fricatives, or Welsh, it might not seem so unique. 



> The other sound you are describing seems to be the way it is in some MSA languages, and also how it was supposed to have been in Ge'ez. Given the proximity of those two regions to the Arabs, I hardly think they'd have been considered to be the unique users of such a sound then...



It's true, but perhaps the "uniqueness" was more determined when confronted with the sound systems of the Romans, Greeks, Persians, etc.

I suppose my comment about that was fairly subjective and off-topic anyway, so I apologize. However the important thing is that the original pronunciation of ض　(which is not how it is pronounced today), was more akin to the sibilant phonemes of PS.


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## Abu Rashid

clevermizo said:
			
		

> Plenty.



For example?



			
				clevermizo said:
			
		

> ḍ is just an unaspirated, velarized [d] sound. While not all languages  possess a contrast between velarized or pharyngealized and plain  consonants, to the untrained ear, ض　just sounds like a d and I've  experienced many a learner of Arabic not being able to quite tell the  difference between ض　and د　except on the effect on the surrounding  vowels.



What you're describing sounds more like the situation where some individuals may "occasion" something approximating to ض whilst the language itself doesn't really contain a distinct phoneme for it.



> It's true, but perhaps the "uniqueness" was more determined when  confronted with the sound systems of the Romans, Greeks, Persians, etc.



I think the Arabs were more in touch with the South Arabians (who are a kind of Arab anyway) and Habashis much more than they were with Europeans. Persians you might have a point.



> However the important thing is that the original pronunciation of  ض　(which is not how it is pronounced today), was more akin to the  sibilant phonemes of PS.



So far, I don't think anyone here has made the case for this.

What actual tangible evidence do you have that ض is not pronounced today as it always was? We see these kinds of claims bandied around, yet no evidence to back them up. Much like the claim I mentioned earlier in this thread of Arabic sin supposedly being pronunced [ʃ] in the early Islamic era, presumably to fit it into the Hebrew-centric view of the Semitic languages that seems to dominate the study of said languages.



			
				berndf said:
			
		

> ض is the emphatic ("dark") version of s2, like ص is the emphatic version of س.



I don't know where you got this idea from, but it doesn't seem based on the reality of Arabic. It might fit nice and neatly into some little matrix of phonemes that you've drawn up, but it simply doesn't map onto the reality of the Arabic language.

Merely stating something sounds plausible, is not in itself an evidence, it is conjecture.

There is nothing about the Arabic letter ض that resembles ش at all. And conjecturing an alternate historical pronunciation for ش is just ludicrous. When you need to conjure up a hypothetical historical pronunciation for both phonemes, then you could arrive at any conclusion you like couldn't you?


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## clevermizo

Abu Rashid said:


> What actual tangible evidence do you have that ض is not pronounced today as it always was?


Sibawayh's Al-Kitab (8th century). (Also)

Place:


> ومِن بين أوَّلِ *حافة اللسان وما يَليها من الأضراس مُخْرَجُ الضاد*
> …
> وممَّا بين *طَرَف اللسان* واصولِ الثَّنايا *مُخْرَجُ الطاء والدال والتاء*​
> *وممَّا بين طَرَف اللسان وفُوَيْقَ الثَنايَا مُخْرَجُ الزاى والسين والصاد*​
> *وممَّا بين طَرَف اللسان وأطرافِ الثَّنايَا مُخْرَجُ الظاء والذال والثاء*​
> Between the beginning of the side of the tongue and following it at the molars is the place of articulation of ḍād.
> ...
> Between the the tip of the tongue and the front teeth is the place of articulation of the ṭā, the dāl and the tā.
> 
> Between the tip of the tongue and just above the front teeth is the place of articulation of the zāy, sīn and ṣād.
> 
> Between the tip of the tongue and tips of the front teeth is the place of articulation of the ḍhā, dhāl and thā.


This is the argument for ḍād having been a _lateral_ consonant. No matter your interpretation of what he means by ṭaraf and what he means by ħāfa, it's clear that he doesn't group ḍād together with the same place of articulation as ṭā, dāl and tā, although in the modern pronunciation, all four sounds have the same

Voice:


> فامَّا *المجهورةُ* فالهمزة والالف والعين والغين والقاف والجيم والياء *والضاد* واللام والنون والراء والطاء والدال والزاى والظاء والذال والباء والميم والواو فذلك تسعة عشر حرفا​
> وامَّا المهموسة فالهاء والحاء والخاء والكاف والشين والسين والتاء والصاد والثاء والفاء فذلك عشرةُ احرف​
> As for the voiced [consonants]*** - the hamza, the alif, the ʕayn, the ghayn, the qāf, the jīm, the yā, the ḍād, the lām, the nūn, the rā, the ṭā, the dāl, the zāy, the ḍhā, the dhāl, the bā, the mīm, the wāw which are 19 consonants.
> 
> The voiceless [consonants]*** - the hā, the ħā, the khā, the kāf, the šīn, the sīn, the tā, the ṣād, the thā, the fā - which are 10 consonants.


The interpretation has historically been that Sibaywah's _majhūr_ مجهور refers to "voiced" and _mahmūs_ refers to "voiceless".

The word "majhūr" means "enunciated" in Arabic while "mahmus" means "whispered." The "whispered" consonants are  certainly voiceless. If by "enunciated" Sibawayh means "voiced" it means that there are some other consonants (qāf, ṭā and hamza) which may have also changed in articulation from their historical pronunciation as compared to modern times.

It could be however that majhūr refers to some other quality that we can't be sure of, however it is meant to contrast with "whispering" and the overwhelming majority of the consonants in that set are indeed voiced consonants.

Manner:


> ومن الحروف *الشَّديدُ وهو الذى يَمنع الصوت ان يَجرى فيه* وهو الهمزة والقاف والكاف والجيم *والطاء والتاء والدال* والباء وذلك أنّك لو قلت الْحَجْ ثم مددتَّ صرتك لم يَجرِ ذلك​
> *ومنها الرِّخْوَة وهى* الهاء والحاء والغين *والخاء والشين والصاد والضاد والزاى والسين والظاء* والثاء والذال والفاء وذلك اذا قلت اَلطَّسْ واِنْقَض وأشباه ذلك أجريتَ فيه الصوت ان شئت​
> Among the obstruent (lit. strong) consonants, those that impede the sound from flowing through, they are: the hamza, the qāf, the kāf, the jīm, the ṭā, the tā, the dāl, the bā  - that is, if you were to say "alħa*j*"(??) and then [tried to?] lengthen [it?], you would be unable to do so [lit., you'd become [such that] it wouldn't pass through].
> 
> Among the fricative (lit. limp) consonants are - the hā, ħā, the ghayn, the khā, the šīn, the ṣād, the ḍād, the zāy, the sīn, the ḍhā, the thā, the dhāl, the fā, and that is if you were to say "aṭ-ṭa*s*" and "inqa*ḍ*" and similar things, you could make the sound flow through (be extended, etc.) if you desired.


However you interpret the meaning of "limp" consonant (whereas he defines obstruent for us quite clearly), it's fairly obvious that he classes ḍād together with sīn, ṣād and zāy and šīn, and *not* with ṭā, dāl and tā.

Emphasis:


> ومنها المُطبَقة والمُنفتِحة فامّا المُطبَقة فالصاد والضاد والطاء والظاء​
> والمُنفتِحة كلُّ ما سِوَى ذلك من الحروف لأنّك لا تُطبِِقُ لشىء منهنّ لسانَك تَرفعه الى الحَنَك الأعلى​
> وهذه الحروفُ الأربعةُ اذا وضعت لسانك فى مواضعهنّ انطبق لسانُك من مواضعهنّ الى ما حاذَى الحَنَكَ الاعلى من اللسان تَرفعه الى الحَنَك فاذا وضعتَ لسانك فالصوتُ مَحصورٌ فيما بين اللسان والحَنَك الى موضع الحروف​
> وامَّا الدال والزاى ونحوُهما فانما يَنحصر الصوتُ اذا وضعت لسانك فى مواضعهنّ​
> فهذه الأربعةُ لها موضعان من اللسان وقد بُيّن ذلك بحَصْرِ الصوت *ولولا الإطباق لصارت الطاءُ دالا والصادُ سينًا والظاء ذالا ولخرجتِ الضادُ من الكلام لأنه ليس شىءٌ من موضعهَا غيرُها*​
> Among them [also] are those that are emphatic (lit. "locked up") and plain (lit. "opened"). The emphatics are: the ṣād, the ḍād, the ṭā and the ḍhā.
> 
> The plain [consonants] are all the rest aside these, because your tongue doesn't close off anything from them [by] rising up towards the palate (الحنك الأعلى).
> 
> These four consonants (ص، ض، ط ، ظ)  - when you place your tongue at their places of articulation, the tongue "locks them up"/"closes them off" by rising up to approach the palate, and when you place your tongue [there], the sound is limited to what's between the tongue/palate and towards the [actual] place of articulation of [these] consonants.
> 
> And as for the dāl and zāy and [consonants after] their fashion, the sound is limited [only] when [by?] the tongue is placed in their place of articulation.
> 
> As for these four (ص، ض، ط، ظ), they have *two* places of the tongue, and this is seen through the narrowing in/centralization of [their] sound and where it not for the "emphasis" , the ṭā would be as dāl, the ṣād as sīn, the ḍhā as dhāl, and the ḍād would be gone from speech because there is nothing else like its place.


So apparently ḍād was pronounced with the side of the tongue,fricative and as emphatic (and perhaps also voiced). Emphatic lateral fricative. Which pairs nicely with a non-emphatic lateral fricative. I'm not saying that ش was ever lateral in Arabic's history, I'm not learned enough about that. It certainly was not in Sibawayh's time because otherwise he would have said لولا الإطباق لصارت الضاد شينا which he doesn't say.


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## ma7adan

Thank you so much mizo, those quotes were great! I think the last two prove beyond a doubt that our dear friend ض was not an emphatic [d] back in the day. In fact it seems that ط was pronounced as an emphatic [d], which I find fascinating! The last quote makes it clear that the unpharyngealized (غير مطبقة) version of the ض had by Sibawayh's time disappeared from the Arabic language. Furthermore, the fact that you can "extend" the ض suggests that it may well have been a sibilant of sorts.

There's still a few points I'd like to give my opinion on:



Abu Rashid said:


> What you're describing sounds more like the situation where some individuals may "occasion" something approximating to ض whilst the language itself doesn't really contain a distinct phoneme for it.



I think that the "language of the daad" phenomenon refers to the phone, i.e. the sound unit itself, as opposed to its presence as a distinct phoneme. So if an emphatic [d] is approximated in a foreign language, even without qualifying as a phoneme, it would be enough to discredit Arabic as the "language of the daad." And in languages like Russian, an emphatic [d] is often approximated (and is a phoneme too).

On a similar note, it's worth considering why the ض phoneme merged with ع in Aramaic. You would think that if a language already had an emphatic [s] and [t], it should not have trouble retaining an emphatic [d]. Even if that phoneme were to be merged, there are more intuitive choices than ع when you already have a ص and a ط.



Abu Rashid said:


> Much like the claim I mentioned earlier in this thread of Arabic sin supposedly being pronunced [ʃ] in the early Islamic era, presumably to fit it into the Hebrew-centric view of the Semitic languages that seems to dominate the study of said languages.



I wish you would stop saying that, given that Arabic is the standard used for reconstructing Proto-Semitic. If scholars of Semitic languages were Hebrew-centric then Proto-Semitic would not have different phonemes for ص\ض\ظ  and ع\غ. It seems to me that you're taking this personally as an attack on the value of Arabic but really, we're trying to work with the evidence we have. berndf was simply trying to explain the Arabic sibilants in a neat way that agreed with Hebrew, because the job of the historic linguist who's trying to reconstruct a common ancestor like Proto-Semitic is to reconcile differences, not become partisan to one language or another.


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## clevermizo

> In fact it seems that ط was pronounced as an emphatic [d], which I find fascinating!


This is off-topic here, but just a brief remark:

It could be, but I'm not sure. Even though he says it would be as _dāl_, I have a feeling he means potentially in terms of _aspiration_. You'll note that in modern Arabic ط　is more than just an emphatic ت. The ت is aspirated and the ط is not. If you remove الإطباق from ط you don't quite get ت. You get unaspirated [t] (like in Spanish for example), which often sounds like [d] for languages in which [t] is typically aspirated (like English).

It could be that Sibawayh tried to pronounce ط without إطباق and heard a sound that he would have classified more like د than ت.

Or otherwise, if ط　really was [ḍ] in Classical times, then that means it underwent devoicing, but kept its status as an unaspirated [t]-sound. This would explain why it is not aspirated in modern times. (I remember once tutoring someone in Spanish and saying a word like "tengo" only to have them look at me quizzically and repeat "dengo?").



ma7adan said:


> On a similar note, it's worth considering why the ض phoneme merged with ع in Aramaic. You would think that if a language already had an emphatic [s] and [t], it should not have trouble retaining an emphatic [d]. Even if that phoneme were to be merged, there are more intuitive choices than ع when you already have a ص and a ط.



This is indeed curious, and I've often wondered about it. Maybe the fricative ض in Aramaic's history actually merged with ɣ (غ) which at least is also a fricative and the two [ʕ] and [ɣ] were not distinguished in writing or subsequently merged (like what happened in Hebrew, and also more recently Maltese). This is still tenuous in my mind though. But we might not be able to know such a thing. It could have been a certain style of speech that became popular - i.e., there may be some extra-linguistic reason for it that we don't know about, rather than simple rules of sound change.


I also wanted to comment that when Sibawayh lists the fricatives, he seems to group them in order by place of articulation so he says:



> ومنها الرِّخْوَة وهى الهاء والحاء والغين والخاء والشين والصاد والضاد والزاى والسين والظاء والثاء والذال والفاء وذلك اذا قلت اَلطَّسْ واِنْقَض وأشباه ذلك أجريتَ فيه الصوت ان شئت​


You'll see he groups them together not by alphabetizing or some other way. He lists first: h,ħ,ɣ, kh and then goes on to š, ṣ, ḍ, z, s and then ḍh,th,dh and finally f.

That can't be random. I could be reading too much into it, but to me it seems he's definitely grouping š, ṣ, ḍ, z, s together as a set because the first fit together as laryngeal-through-velar, the next as post alveolar-through-alveolar, the next as dental and final labiodental.

His classical text from the 8th century reads almost like reading the IPA chart. It's truly amazing to me (this is the first time for me reading the original text, let alone attempting to translate it  ).

Also note he does not like ʕ ع　among the fricatives. He actually says it's between being a fricative and an obstruent.


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## Abu Rashid

clevermizo,

Thanks for posting that, I have heard this mentioned several times, but never seen the actual text. I'd consider this perhaps a supporting evidence, certainly not any kind of primary evidence though. One description, by a grammarian (albeit perhaps the greatest) does not produce any kind of certainty about the way a phoneme was pronounced. Especially in the absence of any modern pronunciation that resembles this. ض has various pronunciations all throughout the Arabic speaking world, and we'd expect at least somewhere there'd still be evidence of this supposed sound. But as far as I'm aware, there is not.


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## clevermizo

^I agree with you in that we might expect it to have been preserved _somewhere_ in some dialect and furthermore there's always going to be difficulty translating in modern terms exactly what a grammarian many centuries ago described with his own invented terms. However there are some other things which have been lost to the sands of time without any extant examples, such as the three-way case system of classical Arabic in modern dialects.

However, there is more evidence in that he reports what is heard in popular speech (and I'm sure there's more evidence of this in reports by other grammarians about the errors of common colloquial speech).

For example his has this section:



> هذا باب ما كان شاذاً ممّا خفّفوا على ألسنتهم وليس بمطَّرِد
> 
> ...
> 
> وقال بعضهم اِسْتَخَذَ فلانٌ أرْضاً يريد اِتَّخذَ أرضاً كانّهم ابدلوا السين مكان التاء فى اِتَّخذَ كما ابدلوا حيث كثُرتْ فى كلامهم وكانتا تاءين فابدلوا السين مكانها كما أُبدلت التاءُ مكانها فى سِتٍّ وانما فُعل هذا كراهيةَ التضعيف
> 
> ومثل ذلك قول بعض العرب اِلْطَجَعَ فى اِضْطجَعَ أبدل اللامَ مكان الضاد كراهيةَ التقاء المُطبَقين فأبدل مكانَها اقربَ الحروف منها فى المُخرَج والانحراف وقد بُيّن ذلك
> 
> 
> ِAs Concerns Strange Things which are Lightened upon their Tongues and not Regular
> 
> ....
> 
> And some [of the Arabs] say so-and-so *istakhadha* some land, when he means to say *ittakhadha*. It's as though they replace a *tā* of *ittakhadha* with a *sīn* as is does when[ever] [such a thing] becomes common in their speech, as [formerly] there were two tā-s (just as a tā of *sitt* was substituted**), but to do such is an *abomination on the gemination (of normal اتّخذ)****.
> 
> Similarly, in the speech of some of the Arabs is *ilṭajaʕ* instead of *iḍṭajaʕ* where a *lām* takes the place of a * ḍād * - an abomination upon the meeting of two emphatic consonants. One of the sounds (*l*) *takes the place of another which is close to its place of articulation* (*ḍ*), and [this is] a pervertedness*** which is seen.
> 
> ** Earlier he discusses how ستّ　was derived from an original *سدس through an intermediate *سدت)
> *** I love this sort of language


This further supports the claim that ḍ was once a *lateral* consonant, as it is deemed similar enough in position to l such that a mistake could be made where the two are switched.

My personal hypothesis as to why ض　has lost all vestige of its initial pronunciation is that the merged of ض　and ظ is very old (and ظ　is one of the most common pronunciations of ض in modern Arabic dialects). This merger would have happened and was brought to most of the Arabic speaking world. In sedentary areas, the sound [ḍh] (as represented by _both_ ض　and ظ) would have been made into a plosive [ḍ] as we find often: هذا hādha > هدا　hāda, etc. Later on in certain areas, the sound was replaced in certain classicisms with the new sound [ẓ] or emphatic [z] regardless of whether or not the original sound was ḍh or ض. This explains the "jumble" we find in the Levant:

مضبوط　is pronounced _maẓbūṭ_
ضابط　is pronounced _ẓābeṭ_
ظنّ　is pronounced _ẓann_
ظهر　is pronounced _ẓəher_

but

نظف　is pronounced　_naḍḍaf_
نظّارات　is pronounced _naḍḍārāt_
ضعيف　is pronounced _ḍʕīf_
ضد　is pronounced _ḍəḍḍ_

In the rural and Bedouin dialects in all cases the sound is as Fuṣħa ظ　or [ḍh] (interdental).

My hypothesis is that at some point the pronunciation [ḍ] emerged as a sedentary pronunciation for the merged phoneme ض|ظ　and eventually came to replace the classical pronunciation of ض. As to how this happened, I have no idea, but I have a feeling there may be some sociological reason for it.

Nowadays, a colloquial variant, no matter how much popularity or prestige it's acquired, could not replace an accepted Fuṣħa pronunciation, but nowadays I think there is much more of a division between Standard and non-Standard than there was in earlier periods when there were various gradations of what was considered Faṣīħ and what was considered inelegant or plain incorrect. In such an earlier period a pronunciation could more conceivably have become so fashionable that it essentially became standard.

You'll note for example that Egyptians regularly use the sound [g] for ج　even when speaking standard Arabic even though most could pronounce it as [dj]. You could imagine a population in a previous era regularly using [ḍ] for ض　and there being some reason to become the "new" standard. As to the actual loss of the lateral fricative itself, I think this is seriously to do with the merger of ḍ and ḍh into ḍh which is ubiquitous in Arabia.

That's all without supporting evidence, but it's my thought on the matter.


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## Abu Rashid

ma7adan said:
			
		

> I think that the "language of the daad" phenomenon refers to the phone,  i.e. the sound unit itself, as opposed to its presence as a distinct  phoneme. So if an emphatic [d] is approximated in a foreign language,  even without qualifying as a phoneme, it would be enough to discredit  Arabic as the "language of the daad."



Likewise some English speakers in certain cases pronounce 's' sometimes like ص that doesn't mean English has ص does it?



			
				ma7adan said:
			
		

> On a similar note, it's worth considering why the ض phoneme merged with ع in Aramaic.



Why is it worth considering? I don't see its significance to this discussion.



			
				ma7adan said:
			
		

> You would think that if a language already had an emphatic [s] and [t], it should not have trouble retaining an emphatic [d].



I'm really having trouble following you here. Pretty much all Semitic languages merged ض not just Aramaic, and they all retained emphatic and [t] as well...

Aramaic seems to be distinct in the way in which it merged most of its lost phonemes. For instance pretty much all other Semitic languages merged ṯ -> s¹, but Aramaic merged ṯ -> t, likewise most other Semitic languages merged ḏ -> z, but Aramaic merged ḏ -> d. Interestingly in colloquial Arabic we see both tendencies.

Also in some of the older Aramaic sources, it appears ض actually merged with ق since it was represented with the grapheme for ق which means the ض -> ع merger tells us even less. Either way, I don't think ع غ or ق (the 3 merge candidates for ض in Aramaic) suggest anything about ض being something like a sibilant.

Even with the case of the other Semitic languages, which merged ض with ص they also merged ظ with them as well, which would tend to agree with the situation in many colloquial dialects of Arabic, where ض and ظ have/are merged/merging. So in those languages it's quite likely a merger took place like this: ض -> ظ -> ص



			
				ma7adan said:
			
		

> I wish you would stop saying that, given that Arabic is the standard  used for reconstructing Proto-Semitic. If scholars of Semitic languages  were Hebrew-centric then Proto-Semitic would not have different phonemes  for ص\ض\ظ  and ع\غ.



Well after they realised Arabic was a Semitic language, and that its etymological phonemes are archaic to Hebrew's and then they discovered Sayhadic, Ugaritic etc. then they had little choice but to start using Arabic to fill in the gaps did they? I mentioned that in the post you are responding to (although apparently you neglected to read that part). That was in fact one of the main supports of my argument, was that for the phonemes which appear in Hebrew, they use the Hebrew situation for proto-Semitic, but for those not in Hebrew, they obviously have to "cut and paste" the Arabic values in. That magnifies my point more, and I'm surprised you don't see that.



			
				ma7adan said:
			
		

> berndf was simply trying to explain the Arabic sibilants in a neat way that agreed with Hebrew



Precisely my point. Trying to fit the other Semitic languages around the situation of Hebrew is a big mistake, especially as far as phonology is concerned, because Hebrew phonology is one of the least conservative.


----------



## Abu Rashid

clevermizo said:
			
		

> and furthermore there's always going to be difficulty translating in  modern terms exactly what a grammarian many centuries ago described with  his own invented terms.



That is precisely the reason for my reservations. As you are well aware he was writing about things which were not even systemised yet, and he was inventing terminology and concepts as he went along, to try and explain things that only recently did we actually organise into a science. Therefore I think there's a great margin for error in interpreting his observations here. It is indeed an interesting point, but I think it stops far short of being conclusive in any way. If a certain dialect had retained it, or something even remotely close to it, then I'd think it had more weight.



			
				clevermizo said:
			
		

> However there are some other things which have been lost to the sands of  time without any extant examples, such as the three-way case system of  classical Arabic in modern dialects.



Again I really think we lack conclusive evidence that 3ameeyah ever split from fus7a. I've read various theories on their origins, and some of them suggest that it may be that they did not split from one another, but possibly from a proto-language, which had no case system, and that fus7a then later contrived this. I'm not saying this is conclusive either, but just throwing it out there to demonstrate that 3ameeyah may not necessarily be just fus7a with some losses.



			
				clevermizo said:
			
		

> This further supports the claim that ḍ was once a *lateral* consonant, as it is deemed similar enough in position to l such that a mistake could be made where the two are switched.



That's certainly very interesting, perhaps more so than the other. But something to keep in mind is that by his time, "some of the Arabs" could mean anything. Remember that Arabs had been living amongst Hebrew & Aramaic speakers for instance for centuries, and most northern Arab kingdoms were in fact Aramaic-speakers themselves. So the range of influences upon "some of the Arabs" could be quite vast, and certainly says little about the origins of Arabic pronunciation.


			
				clevermizo said:
			
		

> ** Earlier he discusses how ستّ　was derived from an original *سدس through an intermediate *سدت)


Very interesting, and very close, but not quite. It is of course originally s¹-d-ṯ. I assume the Arabic sitt came about through a contraction of the d & ṯ. I always found it interesting though that in the ordinal, the ṯ -> s¹ merger occurred, as this does not really occur in fus7a, although it is largely uniform amongst the other Semitic languages (with the exclusion of Aramaic as mentioned above).


----------



## clevermizo

Abu Rashid said:


> Very interesting, and very close, but not quite. It is of course originally s¹-d-ṯ. I assume the Arabic sitt came about through a contraction of the d & ṯ. I always found it interesting though that in the ordinal, the ṯ -> s¹ merger occurred, as this does not really occur in fus7a, although it is largely uniform amongst the other Semitic languages (with the exclusion of Aramaic as mentioned above).



Well I'm talking about _his_ explanation. I'm sure he's basing it off the form سادس in the ordinal set and the word سدس　meaning "a sixth" for him to say that سدس was the original root.



Abu Rashid said:


> That is precisely the reason for my reservations. As you are well aware he was writing about things which were not even systemised yet, and he was inventing terminology and concepts as he went along, to try and explain things that only recently did we actually organise into a science. Therefore I think there's a great margin for error in interpreting his observations here. It is indeed an interesting point, but I think it stops far short of being conclusive in any way. If a certain dialect had retained it, or something even remotely close to it, then I'd think it had more weight.



It's not conclusive at all. All we can tell from his writings is the ض　was not pronounced like د،ط in his day as it is today and that he considered it similar to the sibilants in regards manner of articulation, but in general he put it in a class by itself. As to actually what the pronunciation was seems unclear but it points to lateral fricative.

As to his terminology, although we're not always clear on it, you should be aware that Sibawayh is one of the founding fathers of modern phonology along with Pāṇini before him. Linguistics as a discipline in the West didn't arise until the 19th century, and was heavily influenced by classics such as the phonetic descriptions in Sibawayh's Kitāb and perhaps more so by the descriptions in Pāṇini's Ashtadhyayi exposition of Sanskrit. In some ways our modern terminology and system of theory and understanding is built upon the work of these people. Sibawayh's grammar was translated in the late 19th century by Gustav Jahn.


----------



## WadiH

Abu Rashid said:


> clevermizo,
> 
> Thanks for posting that, I have heard this mentioned several times, but never seen the actual text. I'd consider this perhaps a supporting evidence, certainly not any kind of primary evidence though.



He was an eye-witness.  This is as close to primary evidence as you're going to get.



> One description, by a grammarian (albeit perhaps the greatest) does not produce any kind of certainty about the way a phoneme was pronounced.



Most Classical grammars of Arabic are available online.  When you find one that describes ض as an emphatic [d], please let us know.



> Especially in the absence of any modern pronunciation that resembles this. ض has various pronunciations all throughout the Arabic speaking world, and we'd expect at least somewhere there'd still be evidence of this supposed sound. But as far as I'm aware, there is not.



There is actually a realization of it in parts of Yemen that retains the lateral component (I mentioned a reference to it on this forum a while back).  The widespread realization as ظ is also evidence (a preservation of the رخو aspect).  It has always been widely known in the Arab world (except among lay people) that the modern Fus7a realization of ض is not the original realization.  I've found references to this from the Middle Ages all the way to the modern age.  Just google the topic in Arabic and you'll find them.  One thing I can assure you of is that it has absolutely nothing to do with any Western bias towards Hebrew.  On a minor note, I think the Arabs who originated the theory of the uniqueness of ض were far closer to Persia and Greece than to Ethiopia or South Arabia.  Also, there are descriptions from that era of Arabic as being لغة الظاء instead of لغة الضاد, so this notion of uniqueness is not terribly useful in determining what ض originally sounded like.

Ma7adan,

The realization of ط as emphatic [d] exists in Yemen.

Mizo,

Your theory about the origin of the modern MSA realization of ض (which I agree with) is actually not a new theory at all.  See the following:

Paper published in the magazine of Al-Azhar University in 1987
http://tafsir.net/vb/showthread.php?t=3875
Paper published by the Iraqi Scholarly Academy in 1971
http://tafsir.net/vb/showthread.php?t=3560

(Abu Rashid -- both these papers offer good surveys of the issue in general, including references to older sources)


----------



## clevermizo

Wadi Hanifa said:


> Mizo,
> 
> Your theory about the origin of the modern MSA realization of ض (which I agree with) is actually not a new theory at all.  See the following:
> 
> Paper published in the magazine of Al-Azhar University in 1987
> http://tafsir.net/vb/showthread.php?t=3875
> Paper published by the Iraqi Scholarly Academy in 1971
> http://tafsir.net/vb/showthread.php?t=3560
> 
> (Abu Rashid -- both these papers offer good surveys of the issue in general, including references to older sources)



Thanks much! Those will be excellent reads (especially now that my Arabic is more competent than it used to be when I first started posting here.  ).


----------



## WadiH

See also this thread: http://www.tafsir.net/vb/showthread.php?t=173 , particularly post #8.  One quote I found particularly interesting was this:



وكان ابن الجزري (833هـ) قد حدد الأصوات التي يتحول إليها الضاد على ألسنة المعاصرين له فقال في النشر : (والضاد انفرد بالاستطالة ، وليس في الحروف ما يعسر على اللسان مثله ، فإن ألسنة الناس فيه مختلفة ، وقل من يحسنه ، فمنهم من يخرجه ظاءً.
ومنهم من يمزجه بالذال.
ومنهم من يجعله لاماً مفخمة.
ومنهم من يشمه بالزاي. وكل ذلك لا يجوز). النشر 1/219
وقال ابن الجزري في التمهيد 140-141 : (واعلم أن هذا الحرف ليس من الحروف حرف يعسر على اللسان غيره ، والناس يتفاضلون في النطق به:
فمنهم من يجعله ظاء مطلقاً... وهم أكثر الشاميين وبعض أهل المشرق.
ومنهم من لا يوصلها إلى مخرجها ، بل يخرجها دونه ممزوجة بالطاء المهملة ، لا يقدرون على غير ذلك ، وهم أكثر المصريين وبعض أهل المغرب.
ومنهم من يخرجها لا ماً مفخمة ، وهم الزيالع ومن ضاهاهم).ش
​


----------



## clevermizo

Wadi Hanifa said:


> ومنهم من لا يوصلها إلى مخرجها ، بل يخرجها دونه ممزوجة بالطاء المهملة ، لا يقدرون على غير ذلك ، وهم أكثر المصريين وبعض أهل المغرب.​



For the non-Arabic speakers of this thread:

"And among them are those that don't lead it to its place [of articulation], but rather produce it without it[s original? place of articulation], mixed with the lax ṭā; they don't regard it as other than that; they are most Egyptians and some from North Africa (the Maghreb)."



Fascinating. These comments point to a possible Egyptian origin for the plosive version of the sound. It seems elsewhere it's always some kind of fricative. Also in all of the Indo-Iranian languages that have borrowed from Arabic it becomes a [z] sound I believe.


Anyhow, it's possible we should decide to split off this thread into a proper discussion of the ظاء and ضاد merger or just about ضاد in particular. To steer this back on topic, it seems there has been a consensus that ḍād was an emphatic fricative in the past which is a more likely candidate for the emphatic version of one of the Proto-Semitic "s"-like sounds which was the point of being brought up in this discussion in the first place. It also quite nicely rationalizes how such as sound which was at one point preserved in Arabic, in other Semitic languages like Hebrew actually merged with ṣ ص. Not that we needed such a rationalization, but it fits with the story of the evolution of Semitic languages. The voicing feature in Arabic I think is what made it more likely to merge with other voiced sounds like ظ or ز or even ط which was voiced according to Sibawayh, rather than ص. ​


----------



## Abu Rashid

clevermizo said:
			
		

> It also quite nicely rationalizes how such as sound which was at one  point preserved in Arabic, in other Semitic languages like Hebrew  actually merged with ṣ ص. Not that we needed such a rationalization, but  it fits with the story of the evolution of Semitic languages. The  voicing feature in Arabic I think is what made it more likely to merge  with other voiced sounds like ظ or ز or even ط which was voiced  according to Sibawayh, rather than ص.



But you seem to be forgetting there that Hebrew צ is not just a merger of ص and ض but of ظ as well, and the Hebrew realisation of צ is perhaps a mixture of those 3 sounds. hence its 'z' component. So it may never have even have been ص -> ض anyway. The current values of Arabic, seem to suggest such a merger would make a lot of sense, if Hebrew originally had the same values. But I don't label my theory as anything other than conjecture either.

Also something that needs to be kept in mind is that Arabic pronunciation has been maintained outside the Arabic world throughout history in the madrasahs all across the Islamic world. And they all agree with the current fus7a values. So unless we have evidence of "emphatic d evangelists" going all around the Islamic world and causing them to shift to emphatic d, then I'd say this theory is pretty well sunk. A pre-Islamic value might be postulated, but that would rule out Sibawayh in that case.


----------



## WadiH

clevermizo said:


> Also in all of the Indo-Iranian languages that have borrowed from Arabic it becomes a [z] sound I believe.


 
Also, in borrowings into Spanish, its reflex contains a lateral component, e.g. alcalde from القاضي.



Abu Rashid said:


> But you seem to be forgetting there that Hebrew צ is not just a merger of ص and ض but of ظ as well, and the Hebrew realisation of צ is perhaps a mixture of those 3 sounds. hence its 'z' component. So it may never have even have been ص -> ض anyway. The current values of Arabic, seem to suggest such a merger would make a lot of sense, if Hebrew originally had the same values. But I don't label my theory as anything other than conjecture either.
> 
> Also something that needs to be kept in mind is that Arabic pronunciation has been maintained outside the Arabic world throughout history in the madrasahs all across the Islamic world. And they all agree with the current fus7a values. So unless we have evidence of "emphatic d evangelists" going all around the Islamic world and causing them to shift to emphatic d, then I'd say this theory is pretty well sunk. A pre-Islamic value might be postulated, but that would rule out Sibawayh in that case.


 
Obviously, you haven't read this link: http://www.tafsir.net/vb/showthread.php?t=173 . The historical record is quite damning to the [d] realization. So much so that hardly anyone has argued that it is the original pronunciation. Aside from the oddity of relying on the pronunciation of non-Arabs in non-Arabic countries to ascertain the value of this phoneme in 7th century Arabia, it is well-known that these non-Arabs simply attempt to reflect the dominant pronunciation radiating from the Arabic-speaking nations. In other words, their pronunciation is not some fossilized, pure form as you seem to assume.


----------



## rayloom

I think the historical Classical Arabic pronunciation of the ض was an emphatic voiced lateral affricate.
This is more apparent when one takes Sibawayh's description of استطالة in describing the articulation of the ض. explained in Arabic as:
امتداد اللسان عند النطق بالضاد من أقصى حافته حتى يصطدم منتهى طرف الحافة للثة العليا  
(which means the tongue is "lengthened" within the mouth and touches the edge of the alveolar area).
Sibawayh even lists, as Mizo noted, the place of articulation in order (from outside in), where in this case the ض is before the Arabic ج [dʒhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palato-alveolar_affricate], then the ʃ and y.
Sibaway's classification of شدة & رخاوة (plosive vs fricative) doesn't take into account affricates. You can find the ج considered a plosive and the ض considered a fricative.
This has even led some later western writers, taking only Sibaway's work as a measure of Arabic phonology, to consider that the classical pronunciation of ج for example to be a voiced palatal plosive, as in Watson's _The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic. _(regardless of other classical descriptions of the letter). 

Describing the modern day ض as an emphatic [d] is also quite confusing, Classical Arabic works refer to 2 ض's which might be now considered thus:
الضاد المصرية described as an emphatic d, with the same articulation position of the d.
الضاد الطائية which also described in classical writings as an emphatic d, but differentiated from the Egyptian d as having an articulatory position closer to the ط (not ظ), which is the one common today for the ض and considered standard.

I also think that the affricate nature of the ض is reason that gave rise to a later pronunciation similar to an emphatic z in certain words as 
مضبوط and ضابط, via an old phenomenon itself named الضاد الضعيفة.
It might be the reason also behind the pronunciation of the emphatic z in Arabic words borrowed into some other languages.
(or it could be through the ض to ẓ via ظ , but I don't think so, especially in Arabic regions which don't have the ض & ظ merged together, or in languages which have probably borrowed such words in Classical times).


----------



## Abu Rashid

Wadi Hanifa said:
			
		

> Also, in borrowings into Spanish, its reflex contains a lateral component, e.g. alcal*d*e from القاضي.



Well what's that I see there... is that a 'd'? Why would the Andalusians have been pronouncing a 'd' if it were supposedly something more like [ɬ]?

Here's a few other Spanish words supposedly derived from Arabic words with ض in them:
*adarvar
**adarve
**ademán
**adiafa
**alarde/alardear
*Source

Every single one of them using only a 'd' to represent ض why would that be?



			
				Wadi Hanifa said:
			
		

> Aside from the oddity of relying on the pronunciation of non-Arabs in  non-Arabic countries to ascertain the value of this phoneme in 7th  century Arabia, it is well-known that these non-Arabs simply attempt to  reflect the dominant pronunciation radiating from the Arabic-speaking  nations.



So every time the Arabs changed their pronunciation of a phoneme slightly, they'd send out emissaries to all non-Arabic-speaking regions of the Caliphate from al-Andalus to Indonesia, to 'correct' their pronunciation? Excuse me if I find that a little far fetched. Also it seems you're belittling the independence just slightly of the institutions around the Islamic world that have very long traditions in Tajweed & Arabic.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> ... Spanish words supposedly derived from Arabic words with ض in them...
> Every single one of them using only a 'd' to represent ض ...?


That is not entirely so. E.g. you find _ḍḍ>ld_ in _aldea_.

Also Arabic asserted direct influence on Hispanic languages/dialects far into the 2nd millennium A.D. while the Arabic sound shift was supposed to have happened relatively early in CA. To be relevant, we have to show a transcription to be based on early CA.


----------



## Abu Rashid

berndf said:
			
		

> That is not entirely so. E.g. you find _ḍḍ>ld_ in _aldea_.



That word is not in my list. My statement was regarding the words in the list.

Perhaps your example is due to the gemination. Wadi's example I thought might be related to the long vowel before the dod.

Either way, it's certainly not in the majority of the words we've seen so far. So it's looking more like an inconsistency in the Spanish way of transcribing more than it is a support for this theory.



			
				berndf said:
			
		

> Also Arabic asserted direct influence on Hispanic languages/dialects far  into the 2nd millennium A.D. while the Arabic sound shift was supposed  to have happened relatively early in CA. To be relevant, we have to show  a transcription to be based on early CA.



No further than about half way into the millennium. What exactly do you mean by "relatively early" in CA? If we consider CA to have been around since at least the beginning of the first millennium C.E. then how would the first few centuries of the second millennium be that far removed from the CA of Sibawayh's time?

It just seems to me that a lot of stretching is being done, to try and prove something that really doesn't match up to the facts of the Arabic language as we know it.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> What exactly do you mean by "relatively early" in CA?


There are 650 years between Sibawayh's death and the fall of Granada. Lot of time for things to change.


Abu Rashid said:


> It just seems to me that a lot of stretching is being done, to try and prove something that really doesn't match up to the facts of the Arabic language as we know it.


History of Arabic is not my specialty so I can only report what people more knowledgeable than I say. The only thing I can observe here is a person who grabs every possible straw to deny something everybody else seems to regards as obvious from the historical sources we have as if the salvation of his eternal soul depended on it. It really puzzles me why this is such an ideological issue for you.

There is a consensus in the field that the reconstruction of the PS origin of the ض phoneme as an emphatic lateral sibilant is what fits the puzzle from all Semitic languages best. There is nothing wrong with remaining skeptical. Skepticism is a healthy attitude in academic discourse and your skepticism triggered an interesting discussion. But the most far-fetched theory presented so far is that each and every PS phoneme should be exactly the same as in modern Arabic. Sound shifts are the most natural things in the world and happened at all times in all languages. If a particular language should be an exception, the onus of prove rests with those who contend this.


----------



## Abu Rashid

berndf said:
			
		

> e are 650 years between Sibawayh's death...



So the theory is this shift occurred the moment Sibawayh passed away? Not sounding any more likely to me. Also the 650 years between the extremities of Sibawayh's death and the fall of Granada are still closer to each other than Sibawayh's time is to the earliest known period of CA.



			
				berndf said:
			
		

> and the fall of Granada. Lot of time for things to change.



Right, but that was just one tiny little pocket in the corner of Spain. The rest of Spain had been reconquered several centuries before then.

As I said... a lot of stretching going on here.



			
				berndf said:
			
		

> The only thing I can observe here is a person who grabs every possible  straw to deny something everybody else seems to regards as obvious



So it's a numbers game is it? Anyone not agreeing with the masses must be ideologically motivated and grabbing at straws? Meanwhile, I'm the one supporting the established pronunciation, whilst everyone else seems to be inventing far fetched theories that don't add up to anything other than conjecture.

If you don't have actual facts, that's fine, but don't pretend you do, and don't ridicule the facts I've presented, merely because the majority (of those bothering to post here anyway) do not accept them.



			
				berndf said:
			
		

> from the historical sources we have as if the salvation of his eternal  soul depended on it. It really puzzles me why this is such an  ideological issue for you.



These kinds of accusations about my motivation for presenting what I think is correct do not deserve to be dignified with a response, so I'll refrain from responding to them. I'm truly disappointed you'd make such accusations bernd.



			
				berndf said:
			
		

> There is a consensus in the field that the reconstruction of the PS  origin of the ض phoneme as an emphatic lateral sibilant is what fits the  puzzle from all Semitic languages best.



That consensus seems based on very shaky evidence to me, sorry. And that is why I'm presenting my views.

Also we're speaking about Arabic here, not proto-Semitic, keep that in mind.



			
				berndf said:
			
		

> But the most far-fetched theory presented so far is that each and every  PS phoneme should be exactly the same as in modern Arabic.



Can you please direct me to where such a theory has been presented? Sorry I must've missed it.



			
				berndf said:
			
		

> Sound shifts are the most natural things in the world and happened at  all times in all languages. If a particular language should be an  exception, the onus of prove rests with those who contend this.



Given that this thread is split off from one in which we discussed that Arabic merged two of its sibilants together, I think it's ridiculous to suggest I have claimed Arabic did not shift/merge any phonemes.


----------



## WadiH

Abu Rashid said:


> Well what's that I see there... is that a 'd'? Why would the Andalusians have been pronouncing a 'd' if it were supposedly something more like [ɬ]?
> 
> Here's a few other Spanish words supposedly derived from Arabic words with ض in them:
> *adarvar
> **adarve
> **ademán
> **adiafa
> **alarde/alardear
> *Source
> 
> Every single one of them using only a 'd' to represent ض why would that be?



We already know that the [D] pronunciation exists and the sources already tell us that this pronunciation was common in Egypt and the Maghreb (which included Al-Andalus).  Since no one is disputing the existence of [D] or that it appeared early, your examples offer us nothing that we do not already know.  However, the fact that some words _do_ have a lateral component is just one more bit of evidence for the fact (and I emphasize that this is a FACT and not conjecture) that other variants of ض existed that included a lateral element.



> So every time the Arabs changed their pronunciation of a phoneme slightly, they'd send out emissaries to all non-Arabic-speaking regions of the Caliphate from al-Andalus to Indonesia, to 'correct' their pronunciation? Excuse me if I find that a little far fetched. Also it seems you're belittling the independence just slightly of the institutions around the Islamic world that have very long traditions in Tajweed & Arabic.



You are mischaracterizing what I said.  What is far-fetched is the notion that people in India or Afghanistan remained completely isolated from the way Arabic was spoken for hundreds of years.  Obviously, the pronunciation that developed in places like Egypt and Mecca reached those places and reached them a long time ago.


----------



## WadiH

Abu Rashid said:


> It just seems to me that a lot of stretching is being done, to try and prove something that really doesn't match up to the facts of the Arabic language as we know it.



The facts are pretty overwhelming and prove beyond a doubt that the Classical pronunciation of ض was NOT an emphatic [d].  I mean isn't it enough that you have a detailed description by the greatest grammarian of Classical Arabic of all yet cannot produce one single quote by any Classical grammarian that describes a [D] pronunciation?  In fact, we have medieval Muslim scholars lamenting the [D] pronunciation.  Don't you think it's odd how many books appeared in the Abbasid era attempting to distinguish ظ and ض?  Why don't we have similar books that compare د with ذ?

The facts are there; all you have to is read them.  But I can't force you to read them and I don't have time to copy and paste them for you, so there's really not much left to argue.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Given that this thread is split off from one in which we discussed that Arabic merged two of its sibilants together, I think it's ridiculous to suggest I have claimed Arabic did not shift/merge any phonemes.


I also thought be did. Therefore I really can't understand your behaviour here.

After the very clear message given to you by Wadi Hanifa in the post just above I can't see what else could possibly be said. The onus of proof is now really on your side. If you can present evidence what CA ض was an emphatic [d] I am sure we will all be more than happy to consider it simple repetition of your denial won't take us anywhere.


----------



## Abu Rashid

bernd,

What I find most fascinating is that when yourself and Wadi Hanifa used Spanish words with "ld" for ض then the relevance of Spanish borrowings was relevant, yet when I used them, all of a sudden they were in the wrong time period. This is quite clearly a case of moving the goal posts. Is it relevant or isn't it? Keep in mind, Wadi Hanifa was the first to raise the Spanish point.

Wadi Hanifa,



			
				Wadi Hanifa said:
			
		

> The facts are pretty overwhelming and prove beyond a doubt that the Classical pronunciation of ض was NOT an emphatic [d].



They prove no such thing. The current fus7a value is assumed to be the correct one, if there's clear evidence it's not, then there's a reason to re-evaluate it. The original position is not that the current value is incorrect, the original position is that it _IS_ correct. The onus of proof is on the one making a claim, and I am not making any claims, I am merely stating it is as it is. If there's clear evidence to the contrary, I'm more than willing to adopt it, and I do not in the least reject the idea it could've been something else. I just think the evidence being used is flimsy.



			
				Wadi Hanifa said:
			
		

> In fact, we have medieval Muslim scholars lamenting the [D] pronunciation.



Well I don't necessarily think fus7a's pronunciation today is exactly what is described as an emphatic d. It is very similar in many respects to ظ as you mentioned it was in the past, and that's how I pronounce it and was taught to pronounce it by Qur'anic teachers.

I personally don't think the description of phones always maps out exactly, and that's why I'm very hesitant to accept Sibawayh's descriptions, because we still cannot know exactly what he was describing.



			
				Wadi Hanifa said:
			
		

> Since no one is disputing the existence of [D] or that it appeared early



I don't think we have any evidence of it appearing. As far as the evidence goes, it's always been the case. The hypothetical lateral-emphatic-counterpart-to-shin is what requires evidence, since it's not established now nor previously.



			
				Wadi Hanifa said:
			
		

> and I emphasize that this is a FACT and not conjecture



I think you'll find even those who developed these theories do not consider them established fact, but one possible hypothesis. Interesting that the proponent of a theory would be more certain of it than the founders of the theory themselves.



			
				Wadi Hanifa said:
			
		

> You are mischaracterizing what I said.  What is far-fetched is the  notion that people in India or Afghanistan remained completely isolated  from the way Arabic was spoken for hundreds of years.  Obviously, the  pronunciation that developed in places like Egypt and Mecca reached  those places and reached them a long time ago.



And so all around the Islamic world, they just abandoned their established pronunciations, taught to them by chains of teachers from the Sahabah (rah) and adopted these new pronunciations? I have not mischaracterised you at all.


----------



## clevermizo

As an exercise and for fun, I'm making some vocal recordings of the various historical and/or extant pronunciations of ض as have been described in the various sources. See linked audio file below.

I made up a nonsense sentence which ends up being a bit of a tongue twister  :

ضرب الضابط الضبّ وضجر منه ضيوفه
The officer beat the lizard and his guests grew bored of him.


*conjectured reconstructed phoneme based on historical descriptions by Sibawayh and others. Combines the features used in classical description: رجوة، مجهورة، مستعلاة، مستطالة، مطبقة، مصمتة
1. ɮˠɑrɑbɑ ɮˠ-ɮˠɑ:bɪtˠʊ ɮˠ-ɮˠɑbbɑ wa-ɮˠɑdʒɪrɑ mɪnhʊ ɮˠʊju:fʊh.
lateral
fricative
voiced
emphatic


*most widespread phoneme, merged with ظ　: Arabian & Bedouin/Non-Sedentary
الضاد الظائية
2.  ðˠɑrɑbɑ  ðˠ-ðˠɑ:bɪtˠʊ ðˠ-ðˠɑbbɑ wa-ðˠɑdʒɪrɑ mɪnhʊ ðˠʊju:fʊh.
fricative
voiced
emphatic
(changed:　place)

*rare but attested historical. Perhaps similar to some Yemeni pronunciations
الضاد اللامية
3. lˠɑrɑbɑ lˠ-lˠɑ:bɪtˠʊ lˠ-lˠɑbbɑ wa-lˠɑdʒɪrɑ mɪnhʊ lˠʊju:fʊh
lateral
voiced
emphatic
(changed: manner)

*Standard pronunciation.
*Colloquial Egyptian and Levantine (merger with ظ in most common vocabulary)
الضاد الفصيحة الحديثة
الضاد الطائية/المصرية/الشامية
دال مفخمة
ومستخدمة عند العامة للضاد والظاء
4. dˠɑrɑbɑ dˠ-dˠɑ:bɪtˠʊ dˠ-dˠɑbbɑ wa-dˠɑdʒɪrɑ mɪnhʊ dˠʊju:fʊh
voiced
emphatic
(changed: place and manner)

*Colloquial Egyptian and Levantine. Merger with ظ but used for classicisms primarily
زاي مفخمة
مستخدمة عند العامة للضاد والظاء في بعض الكلمات الفصيحة
5. zˠɑrɑbɑ zˠ-zˠɑ:bɪtˠʊ zˠ-zˠɑbbɑ wa-zˠɑdʒɪrɑ mɪnhʊ zˠʊju:fʊh
voiced
fricative
emphatic
(changed: place) 


At first I tried to pronounce the Sibawayhian ) ) phoneme out of both sides of my tongue and that was a bit difficult. Then I discovered it was a lot easier to do it out of the right side of my tongue rather than the left side. So I'm a right-sider I guess when it comes to lateral consonants . (However, when I make an [r]-trill I do that to the left side.)


I've uploaded the sound file (daads.mp3) to this server.. Enjoy! You'll notice that the lateral fricative does sound quite a bit like ظ though it feels very different to produce (and of course I'm not a native of a language with a lateral fricative). I had to exaggerate it a bit to make it obviously different. My initial recordings though they felt and sounded different to me when recording them, didn't sound very different in playback. By the way, this may be telling. If the lateral fricative was a peculiarity of certain tribes, other Arab tribes may have heard it simply as ظ and this coincidence of sound would lead to the merger.

Oh by the way, I originally made the sentence يضرب الضابط but then I found it next to impossible to pronounce the sequence -ضْرُ- /ḍr/ with the lateral sound [-ɮˠr-] and then into the trill. Maybe it's just me but this seems really really difficult. It makes me curious - are they any principles of إدغام (classical rules/descriptions of assimilation) that pertain to the sequence of ــضْرــ ??

By the way, if my rendition is done well, you can hear that actually the Sibawayhian sound seems to contain components of all those other sounds. I could really see any of them springing forth from the conjectured sound.


----------



## GoldBug

Abu Rashid said:


> Well what's that I see there... is that a 'd'? Why would the Andalusians have been pronouncing a 'd' if it were supposedly something more like [ɬ]?
> 
> Here's a few other Spanish words supposedly derived from Arabic words with ض in them:
> *adarvar
> **adarve
> **ademán
> **adiafa
> **alarde/alardear
> *
> Every single one of them using only a 'd' to represent ض why would that be?


-------------------------------

To make a long story short, there's a very good reason why *ض *is/was represented by /d/ in Spanish.

Spanish /d/ between vowels is pronounced very similar to the *ض* ....not at all like English or Arabic /d/....more like the English /th/ in *THEN. *This pronunciation is also quite frequent when Sp. /d/ is only preceeded or followed by a vowel.

The common name PEDRO, for example, is actually pronounced PE *ض* RO. Listen to a native Spanish speaker when he pronounces *الرياض *and you could swear the last letter is pronounced like Arabic *ض* .

All the examples provided by Abu Rashid above have this /th/ sound for the written /d/.

This also occurred when the original Arabic was a plain and simple */د /. *Arabic *الديوان *became Spanish *ADUANA *(customs and immigration offices) and since the /d/ appears between vowels, it's pronounced *A* *ض UANA.

*This is a simplified rendition of this phenomenon but it proves the adage that "what you see is not always what you get".


----------



## clevermizo

GoldBug said:


> -------------------------------
> 
> To make a long story short, there's a very good reason why *ض *is/was represented by /d/ in Spanish.
> 
> Spanish /d/ between vowels is pronounced very similar to the *ض* ....not at all like English or Arabic /d/....more like the English /th/ in *THEN. *This pronunciation is also quite frequent when Sp. /d/ is only preceeded or followed by a vowel.



This is true, but I think you mean it's similar to ظ or what ض would be to Arabic speakers who had a merged ض/ظ sound rather than distinct sounds.

Furthermore, even if the Arabic sound at the time was not a ظ-like sound, but rather a د-like sound, the Spanish would still have transliterated with a d, so this doesn't tell us much about what ض sounded like. The Spanish d could be a transliteration for [d] or for [ð] even if the Spanish themselves pronounced it as [ð] (never mind the fact that it's actually more like an approximant and not a true fricative).

The reason why a word like _alcalde_ is interesting is because ض is being represented by -ld- which appears to preserve a lateral component.

However you bring up a good point: the instances where Arabic ض is being transliterated as just 'd' in Spanish really don't tell us whether the sound was a stop or a fricative in the past, so it's relatively uninformative.



> The common name PEDRO, for example, is actually pronounced PE *ض* RO. Listen to a native Spanish speaker when he pronounces *الرياض *and you could swear the last letter is pronounced like Arabic *ض* .



I disagree because the Spanish sound is not مفخمة (it lacks إطباق).

I can see however how this would be the Spanish perception, but I don't think that the Spanish reproduction sounds much like ض either as hypothesized historically or the modern standard one.


----------



## tFighterPilot

That's a very nice recording, clevermizo. The different pronunciations do sound very different from each other. Why won't you upload this file to Wikipedia so more people can access it? The Dad article could use an audio example.


----------



## Abu Rashid

clevermizo said:
			
		

> Then I discovered it was a lot easier to do it out of the right side of  my tongue rather than the left side. So I'm a right-sider I guess when  it comes to lateral consonants



What do you make of this description of ض 

̈It seems they're talking more about a sound like you were trying to make, they also mention that heavy dal (emphatic d?) is not the correct articulation.

And I second tFighterPilot's motion for you to upload these to wikipedia.


----------



## clevermizo

Abu Rashid said:


> What do you make of this description of ض



Well I mean this is describing the lateral component (which makes both ض and ل akin to one another). However it doesn't mention رخاوة. I've been watching lots of instructional videos about Tajwīd since this discussion started (on Youtube for example).

What I find interesting though is that everyone, even though they stress this description of the side and it's clear they are using the sides of their tongue to add a lateral component, _are still pronouncing it primarily with the tip of the tongue_ (or so it sounds to me and I could be mishearing) and are making if anything just a heavier version of the standard sound as it is in standard Arabic today. I'm not sure if they're aware of this or if it's subconscious but no one I've listened to has actually made a fricative (a sound with رخوة).

I watched this one Egyptian guy stress the importance of رخاوة in the articulation of ض. He explained رخاوة by bringing up examples like س or ش which you can hold out indefinitely without disrupting the sound. Fair enough. He then demonstrated it with his ض which was obviously a heavy d- sound (maybe with a lateral component, sounded a lot heavier than the typical sound in colloquial Arabic), and tried to hold it out and his face looked pained  but the sound clearly was one that had شدة and not رخاوة although he claimed that he was producing something رخوة.

I think if we're right and this was the sound (or akin to it), it disappeared a very long time ago, and my guess is by merger with ظ.


----------



## berndf

clevermizo said:


> What I find interesting though is that everyone, even though they stress this description of the side and it's clear they are using the sides of their tongue to add a lateral component, _are still pronouncing it primarily with the tip of the tongue_ (or so it sounds to me and I could be mishearing)...


The characteristic of a lateral consonant is a lateral air stream not the part of the tongue with which you produce the occlusion of the air stream. You can form frontal and lateral plosives with the middle part of the tongue alone, depending only on where you produce the opening on the plosive release. The tip of the tongue needn't be involved to produce a perfect /d/.


----------



## clevermizo

berndf said:


> The characteristic of a lateral consonant is a lateral air stream not the part of the tongue with which you produce the occlusion of the air stream. You can form frontal and lateral plosives with the middle part of the tongue alone, depending only on where you produce the opening on the plosive release. The tip of the tongue needn't be involved to produce a perfect /d/.



I see. That makes sense. So then what they've done is generated a lateral plosive which is sort of an amalgam of the classical descriptions of using the side of the tongue against the molars, rationalized against the plosive standard phoneme which has been around now for some time.

Interestingly, "lateral plosives" are not deemed possible or are absent from the IPA chart. Is that because they can't be easily distinguished from apically or dorsally produced plosives?

Also I wanted to comment that I definitely picked words for which the lateral fricative were easier for me to produce. I'm at a complete loss to pronounce يضربون, ضفضع, and ضغط . If I was living back in earlier centuries, I would have definitely used ظ instead if I was learning Arabic and commit this common error. Now of course the _d_-sound is standard, so it's what I learn and use.

I'm still not entirely certain what is meant by the ضاد ضعيفة but maybe this was a solution in certain hard-to-pronounce scenarios. The easiest lateral fricative for me to make is an intervocalic one. The vowels provide a nice "buffer" zone for the consonant. As soon as I come up on a consonantal coda or a cluster I run in fear.


----------



## berndf

clevermizo said:


> Interestingly, "lateral plosives" are not deemed possible or are absent from the IPA chart.


Affricates also contain plosive releases. You would transcribe this as [t͜ɬˤ] (assuming it was originally voiceless) like you transcribe "z" in "pizza" as [t͜s], or [d͜ɮ] if completely voiced... or maybe anything in between, like [d͜ɬ].


----------



## GoldBug

berndf said:


> That is not entirely so. E.g. you find _ḍḍ>ld_ in _aldea_.


1. I wonder if "*ض ض* " *> ld* as suggested above. To me it seems the [*al*] of *aldea* is actually the definite article *"ال " *despite the assimilation of Arabic ل with ض so that presumably Spanish speakers would not have heard an [L] sound during the time the word was entering Sp. 

In other words, I find it far-fetched that the [LD] in *aldea *represents how the 
*ض* was being pronounced by Arabic speakers and thereby transcribed [LD] by Spanish speakers adapting this word.

Most likely, Spanish transcribed adapted Arabic words based not only on what they were hearing, but also based on "what they thought was correct". So many Arabic words were adapted into Spanish with the ا ل definite article as part of the word itself. ALDEA was simply following this common practice.

_*It's also possible, of course, that "aldea" is not of Arabic origin (which is what I believe), but that's another discussion. *_

2. I also question the idea that القاضي > ALCALDE and that the appearance of the second [L] in the Spanish word has something to do with how the *ض *was pronounced by Arabic speakers at that time in Iberia.

If this were true, then presumably ALL words with a ض in Arabic adapted by Spanish would show an [L] in Spanish, but I don't think that's the case.

ALCALDE may simply be an anomaly...Does anyone know of further examples where this took place? All of Abu Rashid's examples above do not show this feature. Why is it only present in ALCALDE?

(I'm not a linguist by training but I trust my argument is clear, even if you disagree with it).


----------



## clevermizo

GoldBug said:


> 2. I also question the idea that القاضي > ALCALDE and that the appearance of the second [L] in the Spanish word has something to do with how the *ض *was pronounced by Arabic speakers at that time in Iberia.



I am also skeptical. I don't think that the -ld- preserves a lateral component from the original phoneme. There are others like alcalde, such as albayalde from البياض which would also suggest ld for ض, but there are other words like _balde_ which is from باطل　bāṭil. That could be metathesis as well, but somehow I don't think so.

My hypothesis is that the -al- was used for the sound of dark long [ā] before an emphatic consonant, which sounds quite different from long [ā] in front of or around plain consonants. The two ā's sound different and one was perceived of as -al. I don't have more data from this but it just comes from looking at the list here.

No matter the case, I don't think we can use Spanish data to reconstruct a lateral component for ض as it's inconsistent. Some of that could be time period, maybe, maybe not. The best evidence for the lateral component is simply the classical descriptions of it using حافة أو حافتي اللسان.


----------



## berndf

GoldBug said:


> If this were true, then presumably ALL words with a ض in Arabic adapted by Spanish would show an [L] in Spanish, but I don't think that's the case.


The counter examples _aldea_ and _alcalde _only serve to demonstrate that the evidence provided by Spanish transcriptions is inconclusive. That is all I ever intended to say; and I think without much further research (in which case we might, just might, be able to explain the differences) that this is all there is to say.


----------



## mugibil

This is a bit off-topic, but since Abu-Rashid "threw it out" earlier in the thread, I think it shouldn't remain unanswered and confuse other readers.
 Clevermizo: 





> However there are some other things which have been lost to the sands of time without any extant examples, such as the three-way case system of classical Arabic in modern dialects.


Abu Rashid:


> Again I really think we lack conclusive evidence that 3ameeyah ever split from fus7a. I've read various theories on their origins, and some of them suggest that it may be that they did not split from one another, but possibly from a proto-language, which had no case system, and that fus7a then later contrived this. I'm not saying this is conclusive either, but just throwing it out there to demonstrate that 3ameeyah may not necessarily be just fus7a with some losses.



If you have really read that bit about the cases somewhere, then the source you've read wasn't worth reading. The grammatical case system is reconstructed confidently for proto-Semitic, it is preserved not only in Classical Arabic, but also in various other Semitic languages such as Akkadian, Ugaritic and Ge'ez (albeit reduced to only two cases in Ge'ez). Never in history has a language just "contrived" a case system out of the blue - let alone the fact that it would have been very difficult to "contrive" a plausible case system if one didn't already have case in one's language. Once again, your usual tendency to insist, whenever possible, that Arabic has always been the same is wrong. 

  And of course, this fact, and the possibility of features vanishing from all modern dialects without a trace, has absolutely nothing to do with 3ameeyah's being or not being direct descendants of fus7a. Inevitably, the original fus7a must have been only one of the various Arabic dialects that were spoken at the time of Muhammad, and it seems very plausible that the modern 3ameeyah are, technically, the descendants of those various Arabic dialects (rather than the product of all Arabs adopting the Quranic dialect and then diverging). That doesn't change the fact that all of these dialects share a common Proto-Arabic ancestor, and that this ancestor certainly had grammatical case like fus7a. Also, it doesn't preclude the fact that the ancestors of the modern dialects must have been very similar to fus7a and to each other, and that they must have been much more like fus7a than their descendants are today, after the obvious innovations that have taken place in them.


----------



## Abu Rashid

Clevermizo, I think Maltese also consistently represents dod with 'd' correct? As Maltese split from Arabic at least 1000 years ago, this would also be a further reason to conclude that the current value is the same one used back then.

Mungu, the theory was from Linguistic history of Arabic, but keep in mind I never said I subscribe to said theory.

Also keep in mind that such a theory would be contrary to the ridiculous accusations you made about me believing Arabic to be the 'perfect language'.


----------



## WadiH

mungu said:


> The grammatical case system is reconstructed confidently for proto-Semitic, it is preserved not only in Classical Arabic, but also in various other Semitic languages such as Akkadian, Ugaritic and Ge'ez (albeit reduced to only two cases in Ge'ez). Never in history has a language just "contrived" a case system out of the blue - let alone the fact that it would have been very difficult to "contrive" a plausible case system if one didn't already have case in one's language ...
> 
> And of course, this fact, and the possibility of features vanishing from all modern dialects without a trace, has absolutely nothing to do with 3ameeyah's being or not being direct descendants of fus7a. Inevitably, the original fus7a must have been only one of the various Arabic dialects that were spoken at the time of Muhammad, and it seems very plausible that the modern 3ameeyah are, technically, the descendants of those various Arabic dialects (rather than the product of all Arabs adopting the Quranic dialect and then diverging). That doesn't change the fact that all of these dialects share a common Proto-Arabic ancestor, and that this ancestor certainly had grammatical case like fus7a. Also, it doesn't preclude the fact that the ancestors of the modern dialects must have been very similar to fus7a and to each other, and that they must have been much more like fus7a than their descendants are today, after the obvious innovations that have taken place in them.



Hear, hear!

Though I don't think fuS7a was itself a dialect.  I think it was a composite based on several dialects.  An even better way to view it is looking at it as having been a "dialect type", which would account for its "instability" across different sources.


----------



## clevermizo

Abu Rashid said:


> Clevermizo, I think Maltese also consistently represents dod with 'd' correct? As Maltese split from Arabic at least 1000 years ago, this would also be a further reason to conclude that the current value is the same one used back then.



Sorry, this can't say much. The earliest written work in Maltese goes back to the 15th century (and it does use _d_ to represent the sound). There are nearly 200 years between Sibawayh's time and the Norman conquest of the islands and then another 5 centuries before we have any idea how Maltese was spoken. That they use a d/t now could mean many things. A) ضاد ظائية was the original variant that reach Malta and it was converted into a plosive later as with ث becoming_ t_ and ذ becoming _d_, B) ضاد طائية/مصرية reached the islands and supplanted what was there previously. Malta/Sicily were conquered and reconquered many times. Lots of time for influence. Remember that there were already different variants of ض in Sibawayh's time and we don't know what arrived in Siciliy. He was describing what he considered the correct sound, but also mentions that there were other pronunciations (like the mysterious ضاد ضعيفة).


----------



## Abu Rashid

clevermizo said:
			
		

> The earliest written work in Maltese goes back to the 15th century



Yes, but we can assume the language was being used prior to that.



			
				clevermizo said:
			
		

> There are nearly 200 years between Sibawayh's time and the Norman  conquest of the islands and then another 5 centuries before we have any  idea how Maltese was spoken.



200 years is really not a long time.



			
				clevermizo said:
			
		

> That they use a d/t now could mean many things. A) ضاد ظائية was the  original variant that reach Malta and it was converted into a plosive  later as with ث and ت,



This theory could be applied to all of the little pockets of Arabic which all merged دض into a d-like sound, such as Cypriot Maronite Arabic, where ض merged with د & ذ It seems highly unlikely that all of these pockets of Arabic, would all independently develop a d-like tendancy for ض if it did not originally have it.



			
				clevermizo said:
			
		

> Remember  that there were already different variants of ض in Sibawayh's time and  we don't know what arrived in Siciliy. He was describing what he  considered the correct sound, but also mentions that there were other  pronunciations (like the mysterious ضاد ضعيفة).



Right, but the d-like one seems to have been considered the one worth preserving, and the one which most commonly ended up in those long lost pockets of Arabic like Maltese & Cypriot Arabic, would be interesting to know how it ended up in Central Asian Arabic. Nigerian Arabic (another isolated dialect group) also seems to have an emphatic d.

I think people often tend to underestimate the religious zeal that was applied to preserving lughat ul-qur'aan. Tajweed for instance is a very detailed field that deals with maintaining correct pronunciation. I find it highly implausible that any sound shifts occurred in Arabic since the dawn of the Islamic period for this reason. Yes prior to Islam, we know they did occur.


----------



## clevermizo

Abu Rashid said:


> Yes, but we can assume the language was being used prior to that.



Of course, but I don't know of _evidence_ that ض  was pronounced as a 'd' prior to the 15th century on the Maltese islands. I recognize your other points but I'm just arguing we can't safely use Maltese because we don't have written records of Maltese from 1000 years ago (when it was just "Arabic"). 



> 200 years is really not a long time.



Who's to say what's long for what and why? Sound change can happen in a matter of decades or on the order of centuries. It's case by case.

Maltese is the written version of a spoken dialect of Arabic. No matter what was preserved for religious purposes in Fuṣħa and maybe you're right after all about the preservation in Tajwīd, 200 years is _plenty of time_ for sounds to change in unstandardized spoken language. Maltese shifted q > hamza in less than 200 years (which by the way, happened independently in other dialects of Arabic) (qāf was still pronounced [q] as late as the 19th century, I believe) and to lose ع 'ayin which are relatively recent changes. 

All I'm arguing is that Maltese doesn't make a good case for a historical d-pronunciation. I'm not saying there isn't a good case, perhaps, just that Maltese isn't it.

Here's my question about Tajwīd: Are there no Qirāʔāt that are lost to us? Is every possible reading tradition from history preserved down to modern times?


----------



## Abu Rashid

clevermizo said:
			
		

> Of course, but I don't know of _evidence_ that ض  was pronounced as a 'd' prior to the 15th century on the Maltese islands.



I agree it is not definitive evidence, but it does tend to bolster the current situation as the most likely historical pronunciation. The current value is d-like, and then we have these 'islands' of Arabic long ago separated from the mainstream Arabic world that also have d-like reflexes, it tends to point in an obvious direction to me. Much more so than an attempt to describe sounds by a grammarian operating in a period in which grammar had not yet been properly codified, let alone terminology relating to phonetics.



			
				clevermizo said:
			
		

> Maltese shifted q > hamza in less than 200 years (which by the way,  happened independently in other dialects of Arabic) (qāf was still  pronounced [q] as late as the 19th century, I believe)



Was it pronounced uniformly amongst all dialects though? Aren't there urban/rural distinctions, much like in the Arabic world?

Also the fact qaf shifted to hamzah in many other dialects, indicates it's a fairly common occurrence.



			
				clevermizo said:
			
		

> All I'm arguing is that Maltese doesn't make a good case for a historical d-pronunciation.



It's certainly not conclusive, but I think it does add at least some weight to the position.



			
				clevermizo said:
			
		

> Here's my question about Tajwīd: Are there no Qirāʔāt that are lost to  us? Is every possible reading tradition from history preserved down to  modern times?



As far as I'm aware the Qira'aat did not disagree in phonology, apart from perhaps the issue of vowel quantity.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> 200 years is really not a long  time.


It can be a very long time, if a language is in a crucial  period of its development. When a language changes its status from a  local dialect continuum to a regional lingua franca languages tend to  undergo rapid changes. In the 7th century, Arabic was in a similar  situation as Greek in the Alexandrian empire where "Koine"-Greek  developed in a matter of decades.


----------



## Abu Rashid

Well from what we know about the Islamic period onwards bernd, fus7a basically froze from that point on. The idea that 100-200 years later it was undergoing rapid changes doesn't really fit into the historical context.


----------



## berndf

If I understand the theory correctly, the idea is that these changes should have happened more or less immediately after the Islamic conquest of large parts of the middle east. Again this would be part similar as what happened to Greek after Alexander where learned records where in denial of any changes and pretended they were still speaking classical Attic Greek.


----------



## Abu Rashid

bernd said:
			
		

> If I understand the theory correctly, the idea is that these changes  should have happened more or less immediately after the Islamic conquest  of large parts of the middle east.



Most of the Middle East was already Arabic speaking, and had been for many centuries prior to Islam.

From the evidences I've seen that the proposed sound shifts are based on, like A.F.L Beeston's claim that Arabic س was actually [ʃ] in Sibawayh's time (that was mentioned early on in the other thread), seem really shaky. He even admits for instance that Sibawayh could just have likely have been describing [s], yet his entire theory about the fate of the sibilants in early-Islamic-era Arabic are based on this original weak assumption.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Most of the Middle East was already Arabic speaking, and had been for many centuries prior to Islam.


Not the population centres along the Mediterranean, North Africa and Mesopotamia.


Abu Rashid said:


> From the evidences I've seen that the proposed sound shifts are based  on, like A.F.L Beeston's claim that Arabic س was actually [ʃ] in  Sibawayh's time (that was mentioned early on in the other thread), seem  really shaky. He even admits for instance that Sibawayh could just have  likely have been describing [s], yet his entire theory about the fate of  the sibilants in early-Islamic-era Arabic are based on this original  weak assumption.


True, the س = [ʃ] hypothesis is not very credible. We discussed this already in the s1, s2, s3 thread. But certainly something is "weird" around the descriptions of ض. I have noticed the same as Clevermizo described in #39: It does not take much training in phonetics to realize that the descriptions of ض you find in the many Tajweed-podcast you can find on the internet does not really match the pronunciations that teachers produce themselves in the videos and if you compare the descriptions of ض and ظ it is evident that they cannot both describe the lenis and fortis variants of one phoneme pair, i.e. [dˤ] and [tˤ]. It is quite obvious that the oral tradition of Tajweed teaching of at least one letter must at some time have deviated from the written descriptions.


----------



## de boer

clevermizo said:


> This is the argument for ḍād having been a <em>lateral</em> consonant. No matter your interpretation of what he means by ṭaraf and what he means by ħāfa, it's clear that he doesn't group ḍād together with the same place of articulation as ṭā, dāl and tā [...].


Your conclusion is right: It is clear from Sībawayhi's descriptions that the articulation of _ḍ_ he had in mind must have been different than today. This point is further strengthened by a recent study by M. Al-Azraqi (2010) in which she showed that a lateral _ḍ_ is still used in at least two remote villages in southwest Saudi Arabia. She also mentions that it need to be investigated in the future how prevalent this articulation really is and if it is also used in neighboring regions in Oman and Yemen as earlier reports have indicated (_ibid_., p. 66).
 A concise overview can further be found in Versteegh (2006) and a more thorough study on laterals in the wider Semitic context in Steiner (1977).


References:

   Al-Azraqi, M. (2010). The ancient _ḍād_ in Southwest Saudi Arabia. _Arabica_, _57_(1), 57–67. doi:10.1163/057053910X12625688929147

    Steiner, R. C. (1977). _The case for fricative-laterals in Proto-Semitic_. American oriental series, vol. 59. New Haven: American Oriental Society.

 Versteegh, K. (2006). Ḍād. _Encyclopedia of Arabic language and linguistics_, vol. 1, 544–545. Leiden and Boston: Brill.


----------



## Abu Rashid

*Moved from here.
*


CapnPrep said:


> Is there any concrete evidence showing that it was always pronounced as it is today?



The onus of proof is on those making a claim which contradicts the established situation, not vice versa.



CapnPrep said:


> I don't know or really care either way (if you do, I would encourage you to contribute to the Wikipedia article).



I am not particularly interested in contributing to wikipedia. I have done so in the past and it's akin to pouring fresh water into the ocean during a drought.



CapnPrep said:


> But unless you believe that historical phonetics simply cannot be studied, I think we need to allow for plenty of middle ground between "pure speculation" and "conclusively proven by concrete evidence".



Anything can be studied, no problem with that, but there's no actual evidence of this. Yet we're told the wikipedia article suggests it's a well established fact. When it is not.

I'm open to all sorts of idea and suggestions on how dod ended up how it did, but to suggest any of the ideas establishes a conclusive verdict on that, at the present time, is just laughable.


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## CapnPrep

Abu Rashid said:


> The onus of proof is on those making a claim which contradicts the established situation, not vice versa.


_Any_ specific claim about how the letter ض was pronounced hundreds of years ago constitutes a positive statement that requires evidence. In the absence of evidence, we have to say "We don't know", not "We assume that it was exactly like it is today".

But there _is_ evidence. I don't know if it counts as "actual evidence" for you, and no one is claiming to have established a "conclusive verdict", but the following statements can be found in the references cited in the Wikipedia article:


> [The _ḍād_] apparently had all the distinctive phonetic features of the _ð̣ā'_ [velarized, voiced, interdental (spirant)] and in addition was lateral or lateralized and probably a stop or affricate. (Ferguson 1959, p. 630)





> There is some evidence in Arabic, based on explanations by the grammarians and Arabic loanwords in other languages (cf. below, p. 89) that /ḍ/ was realised as a lateral or a lateralised /dl/. Since it exists as an independent phoneme only in the South Semitic languages, it is difficult to say anything about its original realisation. (Versteegh 2001, p. 21)





> In Akkadian, the name of the Arabic god _Ruḍā'_ was transcribed as _Ruldā'u_ or _Rulṭā'_, and early loans from Arabic in Spanish (e.g. _alcalde_ 'mayor' < _al-qāḍī_) and in Malaysian languages (e.g. in Bahasa Indonesia, _ridla_ as a spelling variant of _ridha_, _ridza_ 'God's blessing' < _riḍā_) also exhibit traces of this lateral character of the _ḍād_. In itself the evidence of loans can never be conclusive, but it is supported by Sībawayhi's description (_Kitāb_ II, p. 405) of the place of articulation of the _ḍād_, which he says is 'between the first part of the side of the tongue and the adjoining molars' … (ibid., p. 89)


----------



## WadiH

*<...>
*
Clearly, when the Arabs spoke of "the language of the ض", they were not talking about the rather unremarkable sound of the emphatic [d].  This view is no more speculative than the description of any other sound in Arabic and it certainly did not originate with Wikipedia.


----------



## Abu Rashid

CapnPrep said:


> _Any_ specific claim about how the letter ض was pronounced hundreds of years ago constitutes a positive statement that requires evidence. In the absence of evidence, we have to say "We don't know", not "We assume that it was exactly like it is today".



Same could be said for any other letter. How do we know ayin wasn't pronounced as kaf is today pronounced? Can you provide proof it wasn't? Asking you to provide such proof is ludicrous, since you cannot prove a negative in these kinds of circumstances.



CapnPrep said:


> But there _is_ evidence. I don't know if it counts as "actual evidence" for you,



Very circumstantial evidence. I will admit it's interesting, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it is conclusive evidence in any sense of the word.



CapnPrep said:


> [The _ḍād] apparently had all the distinctive phonetic features of the ð̣ā' [velarized, voiced, interdental (spirant)] and in addition was lateral or lateralized and probably a stop or affricate. (Ferguson 1959, p. 630)_



That is a claim, not an evidence. The other two at least approach being evidence, this does not.



CapnPrep said:


> There is some evidence in Arabic, based on explanations by the grammarians and Arabic loanwords in other languages (cf. below, p. 89) that /ḍ/ was realised as a lateral or a lateralised /dl/. Since it exists as an independent phoneme only in the South Semitic languages, *it is difficult to say anything about its original realisation.* (Versteegh 2001, p. 21)



This is discussed above. The grammarians of that time were working in an environment where linguistic terminology was non-existent. Therefore it's very difficult to say their descriptions match what we understand today of linguistic terminology.

I think it's very important to take note of the highlighted sentence. That precisely sums up _ALL_ that I am saying about this topic.



CapnPrep said:


> In Akkadian, the name of the Arabic god _Ruḍā' was transcribed as Ruldā'u or Rulṭā', and early loans from Arabic in Spanish (e.g. alcalde 'mayor' < al-qāḍī) and in Malaysian languages (e.g. in Bahasa Indonesia, ridla as a spelling variant of ridha, ridza 'God's blessing' < riḍā) also exhibit traces of this lateral character of the ḍād. In itself the evidence of loans can never be conclusive, but it is supported by Sībawayhi's description (Kitāb II, p. 405) of the place of articulation of the ḍād, which he says is 'between the first part of the side of the tongue and the adjoining molars' … (ibid., p. 89)_



Did Akkadian have a direct borrowing from Arabic? First I've heard of this. Also regarding the loans in Spanish, I've addressed this above, many loans have no "l" and also as I've mentioned above, even modern day pronunciation does have a slight "l" component to it. When I say qadi, I hear an almost "l"-like sound too, but the primary sound is more like a "d", and the only consistent component of all transliterations into other languages of this letter is the "d", even the Spanish and Indonesian ones mentioned above.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Same could be said for any other letter. How do we know ayin wasn't pronounced as kaf is today pronounced? Can you provide proof it wasn't? Asking you to provide such proof is ludicrous, since you cannot prove a negative in these kinds of circumstances.


In historical linguistics we are actually seldom make any claims about historical realizations of phonemes. We mainly talk about relationships between phonemes just because we can't be sure; never. If e.g. we say that in the Germanic sound shift /p/>/b/, as in Italian _ca*p*ire_ vs. German _ha*b*en_, we do not mean to say that the Germanic /b/ was/is pronounced like a Romance /p/, in fact the German /b/ is phonetically much, much closer to the Italian /p/ than to the Italian /b/, but we mean the relationship between the 'soft' and the 'hard' variety of a phoneme interdependently from the precise realization.

For stability of phonemes we need indeed as much evidence (if you require _proof_, you'll never find any and nothing whatsoever could ever be said about historic languages) as be need for instability. There are two principal ways to provide evidence for stability: 1) If we find identical pronunciations of a phoneme in different daughter languages than we have reason to believe that this also was the pronunciation when the daughter languages split. 2) Coeval descriptions which match the modern pronunciation. Since Arabic Dad is a Unicum, 1) is not possible. Remains 2). With all the circumstantial evidence presented so far, the question is: When does circumstantial evidence become sufficient to reverse the onus of proof. I'd say, we are way, way beyond this point.


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## CapnPrep

Abu Rashid said:


> Same could be said for any other letter. How do we know ayin wasn't  pronounced as kaf is today pronounced? Can you provide proof it wasn't?  Asking you to provide such proof is ludicrous, since you cannot prove a  negative in these kinds of circumstances.


Um, that's why I wrote "positive statement"… There are two positive claims in this thread (roughly speaking): (i) the pronunciation of ḍād has changed significantly, (ii) the pronunciation of ḍād has remained pretty much the same. Both of these claims require evidence; neither one can be assumed to be true until disproved, and failing to prove one does not constitute proof of the other.


Abu Rashid said:


> I think it's very important to take note of the highlighted sentence ["it is difficult to say anything about its original realisation"]. That precisely sums up _ALL_ that I am saying about this topic.


Versteegh is talking about the "original realisation" in Proto-Semitic. For Arabic, he presents (and seems to accept) the evidence for a lateral/lateralized pronunciation. If you don't accept the evidence, you can reject the claim, but this is not in itself an argument in favor of any other claim.


----------



## Abu Rashid

CapnPrep said:


> Um, that's why I wrote "positive statement"… There are two positive claims in this thread (roughly speaking): (i) the pronunciation of ḍād has changed significantly, (ii) the pronunciation of ḍād has remained pretty much the same. Both of these claims require evidence; neither one can be assumed to be true until disproved, and failing to prove one does not constitute proof of the other.



In my book, the existing pronunciation is a baseline. If you can provide convincing evidence to suggest otherwise, then we can abandon that baseline for a new one, but to suggest the existing pronunciation has no more credibility than any conjectured pronunciation you can dream up is just ludicrous. 

Back to my example of ayin being originally pronounced like "k", this has about as much evidence as these claims about dod. There's borrowings of Arabic words with ayin, which consistently have "k" in its place. Therefore according to your ideas the current pronunciation of ayin has no more credibility than the "k".

You might as well just throw the entire language out, and invent your own one and claim that's what Arabic was historically like. The language is what it is. If you have convincing evidence to show some part of it wasn't always that way, then you can re-evaluate. 



CapnPrep said:


> Versteegh is talking about the "original realisation" in Proto-Semitic. For Arabic, he presents (and seems to accept) the evidence for a lateral/lateralized pronunciation. If you don't accept the evidence, you can reject the claim, but this is not in itself an argument in favor of any other claim.



Regardless of what he's saying, it is not in itself an evidence.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> In my book, the existing pronunciation is a baseline. If you can provide convincing evidence to suggest otherwise, then we can abandon that baseline for a new one, but to suggest the existing pronunciation has no more credibility than any conjectured pronunciation you can dream up is just ludicrous.


The only thing totally ludicrous around here I can see is the stubbornness with which you ignore the evidence presented to you and your failure to acknowledge that this new baseline has been reached. This 10th century merger or near merger of ض and ظ documented by coeval grammarians (see paper by M. Al-Azraqi referenced by de boer in #58 above) which still exists in some dialects is sufficient evidence that the pronunciation of the letter underwent a history of change. The only thing left to discuss is _how _it changed and not _whether _it changed.


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## Abu Rashid

I shall read the article. As I said, I don't believe any such baseline has been made. There is nothing but ideas, conjectures, suggestions, theories. If they are your baseline, then you really don't require much.

A merger in a tiny fraction of speakers is not sufficient evidence of anything. I'm quite surprised you'd make such a claim berndf.


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## berndf

I read enough to regard the onus of proof to be reversed, to say the very least. I also agree with Wadi Hanifa that the current realization of the phoneme is much too inconspicuous to warrant the fuzz made around it in the past.


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## CapnPrep

Abu Rashid said:


> In my book, the existing pronunciation is a baseline. If you can provide convincing evidence to suggest otherwise, then we can abandon that baseline for a new one, but to suggest the existing pronunciation has no more credibility than any conjectured pronunciation you can dream up is just ludicrous.


It would be ludicrous if we were talking about a very short time period. The assumption of stability might be valid for one or two generations. For sounds that are particularly easy to produce, particularly easy to perceive, and particularly important within the language (e.g. for encoding crucial morphological distinctions), it might be reasonable to assume stability over a longer period in the absence of any evidence to the contrary.

In this case, we're trying to go back over 1000 years. At this time depth, especially for a sound like ḍād that is typologically/articulatorily/perceptually marked, there is no baseline. Neither change nor stability can be assumed a priori. Evidence and arguments have been presented for both claims, and everyone is free to make up their own mind. But those who may be emotionally invested in the issue ought to be careful to avoid the temptation of caricaturing the opposing viewpoint and belittling those who defend it, and that of requiring a higher standard of proof from one side than from the other.


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## Ghabi

clevermizo said:


> I also wanted to comment that when Sibawayh lists the fricatives, he seems to group them in order by place of articulation
> [...]
> That can't be random. I could be reading too much into it, but to me it seems he's definitely grouping _š, ṣ, ḍ, z, s_ together as a set because the first fit together as laryngeal-through-velar, the next as post alveolar-through-alveolar, the next as dental and final labiodental.


Why, that can't be random. Al-Khalil Ibn Ahmad, regarded as Sibawayhi's master, makes it clear in his book (or the book traditionally attributed to him) kitaabu-l-3ain كتاب العين that the following consonants are arranged according to their places of articulation beginning from the throat:


> وقلب الخليل أ ب ت ث فوضعها على قدر مخرجها من الحلق وهذا تأليفه : ع ح ه خ غ - ق ك - ج ش ض - ص س ز - ط د ت - ظ ث ذ - ر ل ن - ف ب م - و ا ي - همزة


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## WadiH

Abu Rashid, in the Arabian Peninsula itself and the adjoining parts of Syria plus Iraq (the wellspring of the Arabic language),* nearly all dialects pronounce ض as an interdental (i.e. it has merged with ظ).  The only exceptions are in the urban dialects of Qatif on the east coast and Mecca/Jeddah/Medina in the far west, but these are dialects with NO interdentals at all (i.e. they do not have ث or ذ either), so their pronunciation of ض as a stop cannot easily be attributed to conservatism.  They are in any case the least conservative dialects in the region.

How do you explain this situation and how do you reconcile it with your argument from stability?

* Also, Libya.


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## Abu Rashid

^I do not consider colloquial dialects to hold authority over the language. al-Fus7a is the authoritative core of the language. I'm aware you have adopted the idea of "MSA" being an artificial construction that has no authority over the language, but I do not agree with that.


----------



## WadiH

^I don't agree with your characterization of my position (I've written very long posts here arguing that FuSHa, which subsumes MSA, is NOT an artificial construction) but, regardless, it shouldn't you prevent from answering the question.  It's a factual situation and there must be some explanation for it.


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## Abu Rashid

^Well If I've misrepresented your position I apologise, that's just the way it came across to me in the discussions we've had previously.

As to answering your question about the merger in bedouin dialects, the answer is the same as I gave to berndf, a merger in the dialects of a certain number of speakers does not really tell us the historical pronunciation of the sound.


----------



## WadiH

Abu Rashid said:


> Well If I've misrepresented your position I apologise, that's just the way it came across to me in the discussions we've had previously.



No need to apologize!  Just thought I'd clarify the point.



> As to answering your question about the merger in bedouin dialects, the answer is the same as I gave to berndf, a merger in the dialects of a certain number of speakers does not really tell us the historical pronunciation of the sound.



The problem is that ض and ظ have merged in ALL dialects: (1) in one set of dialects they have merged together as a stop, (2) in another set of dialects they have merged together as an interdental.  Since the dialects of set (1) have merged ALL interdentals into their corresponding stops, whereas the dialects of set (2) retain all of the interdentals, the likeliest explanation is that the pronunciation of ض as a stop arose from the same process that gave rise to the pronounciation of ذ and ث as stops, i.e. the loss of interdentals, rather than as a preservation of the original sound (which seems to be your position).  The dialects of set (1) were the ones spoken in the urban centers that dominated Islamic learning, so it is not surprising that their vernacular pronunciation would influence the way ض was read by Quranic reciters.  Indeed, there are medieval writers (whom I've cited on this forum) who objected to the pronunciation of ض as a stop on this very basis.


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## berndf

Wadi Hanifa said:


> The problem is that ض and ظ have merged in ALL dialects: (1) in one set of dialects they have merged together as a stop, (2) in another set of dialects they have merged together as an interdental.  Since the dialects of set (1) have merged ALL interdentals into their corresponding stops, whereas the dialects of set (2) retain all of the interdentals, the likeliest explanation is that the pronunciation of ض as a stop arose from the same process that gave rise to the pronounciation of ذ and ث as stops, i.e. the loss of interdentals, rather than as a preservation of the original sound (which seems to be your position).  The dialects of set (1) were the ones spoken in the urban centers that dominated Islamic learning, so it is not surprising that their vernacular pronunciation would influence the way ض was read by Quranic reciters.  Indeed, there are medieval writers (whom I've cited on this forum) who objected to the pronunciation of ض as a stop on this very basis.


This matches the explanation given for the emergence of the dental stop pronunciation of al-Dad given in the paper by _Munira Al-Azraqi_ cited in #58 above (p.59):


> In the fourth century of al-Hijrah (tenth century AD), the disappearance
> of al-ḍād and its merger with al-ẓāʾ were noted. This merger indicates a period
> during which the two phonemes were used freely and interchangeably. Many
> books were written about this merging, or confusion, as early grammarians
> thought of it. These books list the words that have al-ḍād and others that
> have al-ẓāʾ.
> It has been observed by modern linguists that when two sounds are difficult
> for the hearer to distinguish, they either merge or one of them changes
> and acquires a new feature that makes it easier to distinguish it. It seems that
> the sound shift in al-ḍād is an example of this. Cohen (1961) suggests that
> the ancient lateral ḍād merged into the existing al-ẓāʾ, whose articulation
> remained in Arabic dialects that use interdentals in the form of rural dialects,
> and became a new phoneme in dialects that do not use them in the form of
> the urban dialect.


----------



## إسكندراني

I am in no way a linguist but may I point out that none of you seem to have taken into consideration the way ض is taught in Quranic recitation? I have not heard of any reading which pronounces it differently (though I probably have not even heard quite a few). This is relevant because the قراءات have been passed down since the advent of Islam and are taught traditionally, orally, independently, everywhere...

It was strange to me but I heard several teachers mention ض originally being a ل while teaching students how to pronounce it...

(It was mentioned once but I think that it deserves a bit more attention...)


----------



## berndf

إسكندراني said:


> I am in no way a linguist but may I point out that none of you seem to have taken into consideration the way ض is taught in Quranic recitation?


You find a lot of discussion about it in this thread, e.g. here:





clevermizo said:


> Well I mean this is describing the lateral  component (which makes both ض and ل akin to one another). However it  doesn't mention رخاوة. I've been watching lots of instructional videos  about* Tajwīd* since this discussion started (on Youtube for example).
> ...


----------



## Abu Rashid

CapnPrep said:


> In this case, we're trying to go back over 1000 years...



I think something which really hasn't been addressed is the fact that even in the borrowings where an 'l' is added, there is usually also a 'd'. The 'd' is the most commonly used component of any transliteration for this sound, which suggests the modern sound is probably not wrong. This in itself is a very important point. I have no doubt there is a slight 'l' component to it (even in my modern pronunciation) in certain circumstances, like when an alef follows a qof. When I say qaadi it almost sounds like qaldi too, because the qof preceding the alef gives it that sound.


----------



## berndf

^I don't think we have discussed any transcriptions yet which predate the at ض - ظ merger. Only those would be relevant after what we have learned so far. Later transcriptions are, as to be expected, mainly _kadi_ and _kazi_.


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## Abu Rashid

^In post #25 I listed several Spanish loans from Arabic which use only a 'd' to represent ض

As far as I've seen there's only 1 or two in which an 'l' also accompanies the 'd', seems kinda strange to base your theories (which are then forwarded as 'evidence') on something so infrequently occurring.

As for the claims of a merger, no such merger existed. Only a confusion in some dialects. As far as I understand for it to be considered a merger, it would need to occur in all strains of the language, so that the distinction between them is no longer known. And do you even have any evidence such a merger had any relation to Andalusian Arabic, which one would assume Spanish loan words came from?


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> As for the claims of a merger, no such merger existed. Only a confusion in some dialects. As far as I understand for it to be considered a merger, it would need to occur in all strains of the language, so that the distinction between them is no longer known. And do you even have any evidence such a merger had any relation to Andalusian Arabic, which one would assume Spanish loan words came from?


The way I read the sources presented here, and I don't think I misread them, the merger affected the standard language *and *all dialects, except for some which underwent a completely different set of sound changes. And the subsequent shift to a plosive pronunciation was probably the result of the influence of those last mentioned dialects but at any rate it was a re-split of previously merged phonemes in the standard language.

This is a perfectly logical and plausible explanation and also explains the discrepancies between the sound value in Standard Arabic (whether you call is "modern" or not doesn't matter)  as we know it today and early descriptions which all agree in ones thing, namly being incompatible with the pronunciaition we know today.

As someone without any "stake in the matter", after reading what has been said here, this appears as the obvious _base line_ and I would need to see conclusive evidence to the contrary to change my opinion.


----------



## Abu Rashid

berndf said:


> The way I read the sources presented here, and I don't think I misread them, the merger affected the standard language *and *all dialects, except for some which underwent a completely different set of sound changes. And the subsequent shift to a plosive pronunciation was probably the result of the influence of those last mentioned dialects but at any rate it was a re-split of previously merged phonemes in the standard language.



Given the inability of Arabic to undergo unified changes today when it's confined to a much smaller geographic region, and when mass media is so widespread, I'm really having trouble fathoming how a language-wide merger affected the entire Arabic speaking world back around the 10th. century. I really don't think this claim has been proven at all.

If the phonemes had actually merged, then "re-splitting" would be impossible, since the separate information would've been lost, it'd be like rounding a number down to a certain number of decimal places, then by magic re-constituting the precision spontaneously. Surely there would be a large number of roots mixed up due to this. Can you show some evidence of this?



berndf said:


> This is a perfectly logical and plausible explanation and also explains the discrepancies between the sound value in Standard Arabic (whether you call is "modern" or not doesn't matter)  as we know it today and early descriptions which all agree in ones thing, namly being incompatible with the pronunciaition we know today.



As I've noted before, if you're simply relying upon descriptions made by people in a time when linguistics wasn't even a science, and when such terminology was nowhere near standardised, then you're on pretty rocky ground.



berndf said:


> As someone without any "stake in the matter"...



Whatever that's supposed to mean, it really has no place in this discussion berndf, I'm not sure why you are stooping down to make such accusations, it really doesn't assist your argument at all.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Given the inability of Arabic to undergo unified changes today when it's confined to a much smaller geographic region, and when mass media is so widespread, I'm really having trouble fathoming how a language-wide merger affected the entire Arabic speaking world back around the 10th. century. I really don't think this claim has been proven at all.


The claim is based on coeval sources witnessing it. I see no reason to doubt.


Abu Rashid said:


> If the phonemes had actually merged, then "re-splitting" would be impossible, since the separate information would've been lost,...


The assumption that phonemes once merged cannot split again according to etymological divisions indeed underlies historical linguistics for illiterate societies. For a standard language held together by frozen spelling, this is not necessarily so.


Abu Rashid said:


> As I've noted before, if you're simply relying upon descriptions made by people in a time when linguistics wasn't even a science, and when such terminology was nowhere near standardised, then you're on pretty rocky ground.


But still more solid than an unsubstantiated credo of "nothing has changed".


----------



## Abu Rashid

berndf said:


> The claim is based on coeval sources witnessing it. I see no reason to doubt.



Can you point me to these sources which supposedly witnessed it occurring in Andalusian or even Maghrebi Arabic in that time? 



berndf said:


> The assumption that phonemes once merged cannot split again according to etymological divisions indeed underlies historical linguistics for illiterate societies. For a standard language held together by frozen spelling, this is not necessarily so.



Got an example in mind?



berndf said:


> But still more solid than an unsubstantiated credo of "nothing has changed".



"Nothing has changed" need not be substantiated, since no process needs to be proven.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> C"Nothing has changed" need not be substantiated, since no process needs to be proven.


Sorry, but that is simply nonsense.


----------



## Abu Rashid

berndf said:


> Sorry, but that is simply nonsense.



No, it is logical. The prevailing situation is assumed to be the default. If we had to go back and prove every single prevailing situation, just to accept it as valid, then we'd never get anywhere.


----------



## CapnPrep

Abu Rashid said:


> As I've noted before, if you're simply relying upon descriptions made by people in a time when linguistics wasn't even a science, and when such terminology was nowhere near standardised, then you're on pretty rocky ground.


It's true that it's hard to know how to make sense of ancient grammarians when they make up terms like "bright", "sharp", "soft", "muddy", etc. to describe sounds. This is the case, for example, with Sibawayh's "limp" vs. "strong" sounds (as quoted in clevermizo's post #10), but even if we had no idea what he was talking about in absolute terms, we would have to accept that these opposing terms corresponded to some phonetic contrast to be identified.

As for "tip vs. side of the tongue" and "front teeth vs. molars", these are probably not new phonetic terms that Sibawayh had to invent on the fly, and it doesn't require any modern scientific knowledge to decide if you produce a sound more with the tip or the side of your tongue, or if the action is happening nearer the front teeth or the back teeth. If someone today told you that they produced د with the tip of their tongue at the front teeth, but ض with the side of their tongue at the back teeth, I guess you would either question their intelligence/sincerity, or their pronunciation of Arabic. Same with Sibawayh.


berndf said:


> I don't think we have discussed any  transcriptions yet which predate the at ض - ظ merger. Only those would  be relevant after what we have learned so far. Later transcriptions are,  as to be expected, mainly _kadi_ and _kazi_.


For Spanish, according to Penny (2002, p. 265ff), the "large majority" of Arabic loans had already entered the language by the 10th century, but I guess there would be almost no textual evidence from this period. The earliest examples in Old Spanish texts would already represent a few centuries of change, and the modern Spanish forms will show further divergence. That said, here are all of the borrowings according to this list that derive from Arabic words containing ض:


> A*d*arvar: der. Del ár. Hisp. [aḍ]*ḍ*árb, y este del ár. Clás. *ḍ*arb, golpe
> A*d*efera: del ár. Hisp. A*ḍḍ*afíra, y este del ár. Clás. *ḍ*afīrah, trenza
> A*d*emán: del ár. Hisp. A*ḍḍ*íman o aḍḍamán, y este del ár. Clás. *ḍ*amān
> A*d*iafa: del ár. Hisp. A*ḍḍ*iyáfa , y este del ár. Clás. *ḍ*iyāfah, [presente de] hospitalidad
> Alar*d*e: del ár. Hisp. Al‘ár*ḍ*, y  este del ár. Clás. ‘ar*ḍ* revista militar.
> Alaro*z*: del ár. Hisp. *al‘arú*ḍ*, y este del ár. Clás. ‘arū*ḍ*, poste de tienda
> Albai*d*a: del ár. Hisp. Albáy*ḍ*a, y este del ár. Clás. Bayḍā', blanca
> Albaya*ld*e: del ár. Hisp. Albayá*ḍ*, y este del ár. Clás. Bayā*ḍ*
> A*ld*aba: del ár. Hisp. A*ḍḍ*abba, y este del ár. Clás. *ḍ*abbah, literalmente, 'lagarta'
> A*ld*ea: del ár. Hisp. A*ḍḍ*áy‘a, y este del ár. Clás. *ḍ*ay‘ah
> Alfai*d*a: del ár. Hisp. Alfáyi*ḍ*a, y este del ár. Clás. Fā'i*ḍ*ah, desbordante. Crecida de río.
> Alfar*d*a/Far*d*a: del ár. Hisp. alfár*ḍ*a, y este del ár. Clás. Far*ḍ*ah, imposición, deber, cuota.
> Alfar*d*ón: quizá del ár. Hisp. Alḥar*ḍ*ún, y este del ár. Clás. ḥirḏawn, lagarto
> Algai*d*a: del ár. Hisp. Alḡáy*ḍ*a, y este del ár. Clás. ḡay*ḍ*ah
> Algarra*d*a: del ár. Hisp. Al‘arrá*ḍ*a, y este del ár. Clás. ‘arrādah. Máquina de guerra
> Ali*d*ada; del ár. Hisp. Al‘i*ḍ*áda, y este del ár. Clás. ‘i*ḍ*ādah
> Alma*d*raba: del ár. Hisp. Alma*ḍ*rába, lugar donde se golpea o lucha. Pesca de atunes.
> Arraba*l*/Raba*l*: del ár. Hisp. Arrabá*ḍ*, y este del ár. Clás. Raba*ḍ*      suburbio.
> Arria*t*e: del ár. Hisp. Arriyá*ḍ*, y este del ár. Clás. Riyā*ḍ*, pl. de raw*ḍ*, huerto
> Ba*d*al: del ár. Hisp. Bá*ḍ*‘a, molla, y este del ár. Clás. Ba*ḍ*‘ah, trozo.
> Ca*d*í: del fr. Cadi, y este del ár. Clás. Qā*ḍ*ī
> *D*ahir: del ár. Marroquí *ḍ*[a]hir, decreto, y este del ár. Clás. ẓahīr
> *D*aifa: del ár. Hisp. *ḍ*áyfa, señora, y este del ár. Clás. *ḍ*ayfah, huéspeda. Concubina
> *D*aza: del ár. Marroquí *ḍ*[a]hir, decreto, y este del ár. Clás. ẓahīr
> Far*d*acho/Gar*d*acho: del ár. Hisp. ḥar*ḍ*ún o ḥarḏún, y este del ár. Clás. ḥirḏawn
> Fo*d*olí: del ár. Hisp. Fu*ḍ*ulí, y este del ár. Clás. Fu*ḍ*ūlī
> Ja*d*raque: del ár. *ša*ḍ*rat
> Mohe*d*al/Mohe*d*a: del ár. Hisp. Mufí*ḍ*a, y este del ár. Clás. Mufī*ḍ*ah, desbordante
> Ná*d*ir: del ár. Marroquí nā*ḍ*er, y este del ár. Clás. Nāẓir, inspector
> Raba*d*án: del ár. Hisp. Rábba*ḍḍ*án, y este del ár. Clás. Rabbu*ḍḍ*a'n, señor de ovejas
> Rama*d*án: del ár. Hisp. Rama*ḍ*án, y este del ár. Clás. Rama*ḍ*ān
> Rau*d*a: del ár. Hisp. Ráw*ḍ*a, mausoleo, y este del ár. Clás. Raw*ḍ*ah, jardín


It is clear that there are very few cases where etymological ض corresponds to anything other than ‹d› in modern Spanish, and even then the result does not always involve ‹l› (i.e. _alaro*z*_ and _arria*t*e_). In _a*ld*aba_ and _a*ld*ea_ (already mentioned earlier in this thread by berndf #29), we may have restoration/attraction of the unassimilated prefix _al-_, and _(ar)raba*l*_ could involve reanalysis and replacement by the suffix _-al_.

All of which basically leaves us with _alca*ld*e_ (which does not actually appear above because the compilers of the list incorrectly merged it with _alcaide_ ) and _albaya*ld*e_, and I would agree that this is really too little to go on. Keeping in mind that there could be ‹l›s in the Old Spanish forms of some of these words, and that obsolete borrowings and proper names (e.g. toponyms) also need to be considered. It wouldn't necessarily take a huge number of additional examples to indicate the existence of "something worth explaining" here, but the evidence as presented so far is not compelling.

What we can say, I think, is the following:

At the time of borrowing, Arabic ض sounded more similar in the ears of Spanish speakers to their ‹d› than to any other single letter (in particular ‹l›).
Other Arabic letters got mapped to Spanish ‹d›, for the same reason.
Spanish speakers did not consistently reproduce/approximate a lateral component in the sound of ض, either because they were unable/uninclined to do so, or because they didn't sufficiently perceive one.



Abu Rashid said:


> As far as I've seen there's only 1 or two in which an 'l' also  accompanies the 'd', seems kinda strange to base your theories (which  are then forwarded as 'evidence') on something so infrequently  occurring.


This would indeed be "kinda strange", but the lateral hypothesis is not based solely on the Spanish data.


Abu Rashid said:


> No, it is logical. The prevailing situation  is assumed to be the default.


As I tried to explain above, this assumption is only valid for situations that can be expected to remain stable indefinitely. These situations are very common in high school physics classes, and very rare in real life. For situations that can be expected to change slowly and/or intermittently, the assumption of non-change can be "a good bet" for short periods of time, but becomes less and less likely to be true the further back you go.


----------



## Abu Rashid

CapnPrep said:


> As for "tip vs. side of the tongue" and "front teeth vs. molars", these are probably not new phonetic terms that Sibawayh had to invent on the fly, and it doesn't require any modern scientific knowledge to decide if you produce a sound more with the tip or the side of your tongue, or if the action is happening nearer the front teeth or the back teeth. If someone today told you that they produced د with the tip of their tongue at the front teeth, but ض with the side of their tongue at the back teeth, I guess you would either question their intelligence/sincerity, or their pronunciation of Arabic. Same with Sibawayh.



This is where I think the misunderstanding is. I definitely pronounce ض with the back/sides of my mouth, not with the front, and that is the way it is taught for tajweed.

Thanks for the list of Arabic loans into Spanish. I think it is overwhelmingly obvious that the 'd' component is the most commonly occurring one in transliterations of borrowings. I don't discount the idea completely that there may have been a slight 'l' component to it in the past (and even today, when pronounced right following certain consonant/vowel pairs), but what people have been suggesting here is that the 'd' component is pretty much entirely a modern invention, and that previously the 'l' component was the overwhelming component of this sound.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> berndf said:
> 
> 
> 
> As someone without any "stake in the matter"...
> 
> 
> 
> Whatever that's supposed to mean, ...
Click to expand...

This means that I do not hold any particular views as to how early Islamic Arabic phonology evolved in general. I am trying to form an opinion based on the learned opinions presented here considering myself _relatively _unbiased by previously held views and the case for a change seems convincing enough for me to accept them as the base line for discussion.



Abu Rashid said:


> This is where I think the misunderstanding is. I definitely pronounce ض with the back/sides of my mouth, not with the front, and that is the way it is taught for tajweed.


He obviously classified the emphatics based only on their primary point of articulation, otherwise he wouldn't have classified_ṭā_ together with _dāl_ and _tā_.



Abu Rashid said:


> ..., but what people have been suggesting here is that the 'd' component is pretty much entirely a modern invention, and that previously the 'l' component was the overwhelming component of this sound.


That is indeed what many scholars say. I agree with you that Spanish transcription would be a poor basis for such a claim. Here is a recent article summarizing the scholarly opinions on the matter and the evidence on which they are based. Happy reading.


----------



## berndf

I just thought of one thing: The assumption is that Dad was originally a fricative. Very small changes in the articulation can completely change the perception of the sound. There is an similar case in Danish. There is a "soft d". It has an extremely brief alveolar/dental closure but laterally, the closure is incomplete. This makes it sound like an "l". Listen to the word Danish word "mad" here. There is a discussion about the sound in the Nordic forum.


----------



## Abu Rashid

berndf said:


> This means that I do not hold any particular views as to how early Islamic Arabic phonology evolved in general.


 
As opposed to.. ?



berndf said:


> I am trying to form an opinion based on the learned opinions presented here considering myself _relatively _unbiased



As am I, I'm just less eager to jump to conclusions.



berndf said:


> Here is a recent article summarizing the scholarly opinions on the matter and the evidence on which they are based. Happy reading.



I have printed, and will be reading.



berndf said:


> I just thought of one thing: The assumption is that Dad was originally a fricative. Very small changes in the articulation can completely change the perception of the sound. There is an similar case in Danish. There is a "soft d". It has an extremely brief alveolar/dental closure but laterally, the closure is incomplete. This makes it sound like an "l". Listen to the word Danish word "mad" here. There is a discussion about the sound in the Nordic forum.



I could not get any of the sounds on that page to work, seems browser-specific or something.


----------



## Abu Rashid

berndf,

I have begun reading through that article, and it appears to me from the very start their knowledge of Arabic dialects leaves a lot to be desired.

For instance in the opening paragraph they state:



> why do Bedouins or elements of rural populations in areas as far flung as Yemen, Syria and the Libyan Desert pronounce both ḍaḍ and ẓa' as ẓa'?


It's no secret that bedouin dialects from far flung regions do share a lot of innovations that they don't share with urban dialects that are in closer proximity to them. That in itself tells us nothing about the historical pronunciation of ḍoḍ.



> Why do Arabic speakers in urban areas from Morocco to Damascus generally pronounce both letters as ḍaḍ?



This is simply not true. In fact the only case in which I can think of that urban speakers pronounce ẓ as ḍ is when it is doubled, like naẓẓaarah as naḍḍaarah or naẓẓaafah as naḍḍaafah. It seems this is related to the fact the phoneme is doubled. I cannot think of another case in which this occurs, and saying "generally" is just completely unfactual. To me it's always felt easier to pronounce it as ḍoḍ in these cases, and I figured that's probably why people did so, as they got lazy and adopted this way.


----------



## Abu Rashid

Reading further, it seems they're now claiming that because OSA languages began to merge ḍ and ẓ therefore Arabic must've too. That's about as logical as stating because Akkadian merged sin & shin, therefore Hebrew must've too.


----------



## CapnPrep

Abu Rashid said:


> Why do Arabic speakers in urban areas from Morocco to Damascus generally pronounce both letters as ḍaḍ?
> 
> 
> 
> This is simply not true.
Click to expand...

It is true, because he's talking about colloquial dialects here, not regional pronunciations of MSA. For example, how do you say "bone", "back", or "fingernail" in Moroccan, Syrian, Egyptian, etc. urban colloquial as compared to MSA?

And the article agrees in large part with the position you outlined above, which is that there has always been some subset of Arabic that maintained a distinction between the two phonemes, although the dominant trend when all varieties are taken into account was toward merger.


----------



## Abu Rashid

CapnPrep said:


> It is true, because he's talking about colloquial dialects here, not regional pronunciations of MSA.


 
Yes I'm aware of that, and it's still not correct.



CapnPrep said:


> For example, how do you say "bone", "back", or "fingernail" in Moroccan, Syrian, Egyptian, etc. urban colloquial as compared to MSA?



I can quite easily give you the same number of words where it is pronounced ẓ. ẓarif, lafeẓ, niẓam, hafiẓ etc. in Egyptian for instance are all pronounced like this. I'd say the situation here is no different than that of ذ which is sometimes pronounced as د and sometimes as ز, or ث which is sometimes pronounced as س and sometimes as ت. Inconsistency in these phonemes does not lead us to believe they were historically merged in Arabic, nor that they had some unknown pronunciation.



CapnPrep said:


> And the article agrees in large part with the position you outlined above, which is that there has always been some subset of Arabic that maintained a distinction between the two phonemes, although the dominant trend when all varieties are taken into account was toward merger.



As fus7a exists alongside the dialects, I think it's highly unlikely any further mergers would ever happen in Arabic. Whilst people may become lax in their everyday speech, they will always learn at school or in the media, the true distinction between the phonemes, and so merging will not occur.


----------



## CapnPrep

Abu Rashid said:


> I can quite easily give you the same number of words where it is pronounced ẓ. ẓarif, lafeẓ, niẓam, hafiẓ etc. in Egyptian for instance are all pronounced like this.


It's not (only) a question of how many words, but also of the type of vocabulary involved. Of course educated speakers also produce a lot of words with [ẓ], because of the direct influence from fus7a that you just mentioned. To show that the phonemic distinction is maintained within a given dialectal variety, you need to find minimal pairs involving [ḍ] vs. [ẓ] in dialect-only words for which the speakers have no fus7a cognate.


Abu Rashid said:


> Inconsistency in these  phonemes does not lead us to believe they were historically merged in  Arabic, nor that they had some unknown pronunciation.


In the examples I mentioned, the correspondance always goes in one direction: Classical/MSA ẓ corresponds to urban dialectal ḍ. If it's just a matter of "inconsistency" or "confusion", you should be able to find a comparable number of examples where the dialectal form has ẓ while MSA has ḍ.


Abu Rashid said:


> As fus7a exists alongside the dialects, I think it's highly unlikely any  further mergers would ever happen in Arabic. Whilst people may become  lax in their everyday speech, they will always learn at school or in the  media, the true distinction between the phonemes, and so merging will  not occur.


Who said anything about further mergers? We're trying to understand the history of the language here, not tell the future.


----------



## rayloom

Abu Rashid said:


> berndf said:
> 
> 
> 
> Here is a recent article summarizing the scholarly opinions on the matter and the evidence on which they are based. Happy reading.
> 
> 
> 
> Reading further, it seems they're now claiming that because OSA languages began to merge ḍ and ẓ therefore Arabic must've too. That's about as logical as stating because Akkadian merged sin & shin, therefore Hebrew must've too.
Click to expand...


I agree that Brown's article seems to be stretching it a bit comparing the situation in OSA.

Although in MCA MacDonald's article on "Ancient North Arabian" in "The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia", he refers to a Safaitic inscription which mispells ẓ for ḍ:
"This is in an unpublished Safaitic text in which the author spells the word qyẓ “he spent the dry season” as ʼyḍ in an unequivocal context. This is the earliest attestation of a pronunciation in which the etymological phonemes /q/ and /ẓ/ had fallen under /ʼ/ and /ḍ/ respectively" 
Which may be more relevant to this discussion. (unfortunately MacDonald doesn't give a date for this inscription)

Also in the word pairs the author of the article (J. Brown) listed, I think the author should've also searched for possible cognates in different Semitic languages. For example, he lists ẓrr (meaning "rock", which has I believe cognates in Akkadian ṣrr, Cananite ṣwr and Aramaic ṭwr) as an Arabic dialectal alteration of ḍrr (meaning "harm"). Although some of the other pairs are quite obvious as dialectal variation, a thoruogh search is still needed.


----------



## rayloom

Just to throw something interesting into the discussion 
Regarding the confusion in urban dialects, 2 interesting word pairs come to mind:

ضبط ظبط
The Classical/MSA is only ضبط (with a ḍ), yet in Urban dialects, it almost invariably becomes ظبط (with a ẓ). Even in all derivations of the root.

ظلم ضلم
The Classical/MSA is ظلم (with a ẓ).  The root carries two main meanings: "dark" and "injustice".  Interestingly, in Urban dialects, derivations of this root with the  meaning "dark" are with a ض ḍ, while derivations with the meaning of "injustice" have a ẓ.
ẓulm: injustice
ẓalama (to treat unjustly). ẓalim (active participle), maẓlum (passive participle)
انظلم اتظلم متظلم...etc
while:
ḍalaam, ḍalma/t: darkness
ḍallam: became dark
muḍallim: dark

Can we say there was a phonemic split in the latter pair?


----------



## Abu Rashid

CapnPrep said:


> It's not (only) a question of how many words, but also of the type of vocabulary involved. Of course educated speakers also produce a lot of words with [ẓ], because of the direct influence from fus7a that you just mentioned. To show that the phonemic distinction is maintained within a given dialectal variety, you need to find minimal pairs involving [ḍ] vs. [ẓ] in dialect-only words for which the speakers have no fus7a cognate.



Unless all words merged, then no merger occurred.



CapnPrep said:


> In the examples I mentioned, the correspondance always goes in one direction: Classical/MSA ẓ corresponds to urban dialectal ḍ. If it's just a matter of "inconsistency" or "confusion", you should be able to find a comparable number of examples where the dialectal form has ẓ while MSA has ḍ.



Isn't that what I just did?



CapnPrep said:


> Who said anything about further mergers? We're trying to understand the history of the language here, not tell the future.



I was speaking from the perspective of the point at which fus7a became a consciously preserved language, ie. the dawn of Islam, and perhaps before. From that point going forward, I am very sceptical that any further mergers could ever occur. Yes prior to this time s1 & s2 did merge, but I don't think that's possible from that point on.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> I was speaking from the perspective of the point at which fus7a became a consciously preserved language, ie. the dawn of Islam, and perhaps before. From that point going forward, I am very sceptical that any further mergers could ever occur. Yes prior to this time s1 & s2 did merge, but I don't think that's possible from that point on.


That is one of the point of the theory: The original pronunciation was lost very early in the history of Islamic standard Arabic and ẓ and ḍ were "artificially" differentiated in the standard language by adopting in the standard language a form from a dialect where ẓ and ḍ were not merged.


----------



## Abu Rashid

rayloom said:


> Although in MCA MacDonald's article on "Ancient North Arabian" in "The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia", he refers to a Safaitic inscription which mispells ẓ for ḍ:
> "This is in an unpublished Safaitic text in which the author spells the word qyẓ “he spent the dry season” as ʼyḍ in an unequivocal context. This is the earliest attestation of a pronunciation in which the etymological phonemes /q/ and /ẓ/ had fallen under /ʼ/ and /ḍ/ respectively"
> Which may be more relevant to this discussion. (unfortunately MacDonald doesn't give a date for this inscription)



That's interesting, and I do remember coming across some isolated instances of confusions when reading that book, but I still don't think that in itself is any evidence whatsoever for a merger.



rayloom said:


> Also in the word pairs the author of the article (J. Brown) listed, I think the author should've also searched for possible cognates in different Semitic languages. For example, he lists ẓrr (meaning "rock", which has I believe cognates in Akkadian ṣrr, Cananite ṣwr and Aramaic ṭwr) as an Arabic dialectal alteration of ḍrr (meaning "harm"). Although some of the other pairs are quite obvious as dialectal variation, a thoruogh search is still needed.



But the root ḍrr also exists in many of those languages, so the idea it's an Arabic confusion is wrong, and even if it were right, would still not tell us there was a merger.



berndf said:


> That is one of the point of the theory: The original pronunciation was lost very early in the history of Islamic standard Arabic and ẓ and ḍ were "artificially" differentiated in the standard language by adopting in the standard language a form from a dialect where ẓ and ḍ were not merged.



But the standard language has been there all along, so why would it only be "artificially" differentiated now?


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> But the root ḍrr also exists in many of those languages


How could it  as ḍ don't/did exist in them.



Abu Rashid said:


> and even if it were right, would still not tell us there was a merger.


It actually would. Systematic rearrangement of graphemes is a very strong signal for a merger of the phonemes they originally represented.



Abu Rashid said:


> But the standard language has been there all along, so why would it only be "artificially" differentiated now?


It says that the original sound of Dad was on the brink of extinction ("a relict") already in Mohammed's day.

Besides, it is not clear to me how classical and MSA relate to the pre-Islamic Arabic koine.


----------



## rayloom

berndf said:


> How could it  as ḍ did exist in them.



For ḍrr, it would be reflected with a 3ayn in Aramaic, as opposed to ṭ. Also the phoneme ḍ occurs in OSA and Ge'ez. See also here.

While ẓrr, it would be reflected with a ṭ in Aramaic, plus the phoneme ẓ occurs in OSA. See here.

So the roots are different in different Semitic languages, but in Brown's article, the author considers ẓrr (rock) to be a dialectal variation of ḍrr (harm)!


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## berndf

^Ok, I agree with you on Aramaic and Ge'ez (and also Ugaritic) where PS *ṱ and *ṣ́  ..have different reflexes. But in Akkadian and Canaanite languages, the the two are merged.


----------



## Abu Rashid

berndf said:


> How could it  as ḍ don't/did exist in them.
> It actually would. Systematic rearrangement of graphemes is a very strong signal for a merger of the phonemes they originally represented.



Obviously I meant separate roots would appear in those languages according to how they had merged the phoneme, not necessarily that they all had a distinct reflex of ḍ.

e.g.

*Hebrew: *
Reflex of root ḍrr
צָרַר (show hostility towards, vex)

Reflex of separate root ẓrr
צַר (pebble, flint)

As the reflex of these two phonemes is the same in Hebrew the roots will end up looking the same, but the two variant meanings show us there was different roots that they derived from

*Ge'ez:
*Reflex of root ḍrr
ፀረረ (make an enemy of, show hostility towards)

*Sabaic:*
Reflex of root ḍrr
ḍrr (wage war)
ḍr (an enemy)

Reflex of separate root ẓrr
ẓwr (rock, foundation)

*Aramaic:*
Reflex of root ḍrr
ער (an enemy)

Reflex of separate root ẓrr
טרנא (rock, flint)

Quite clearly there's two separate roots, and one begins with ḍ whilst the other begins with ẓ.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Obviously I meant separate roots would appear in those languages according to how they had merged the phoneme.


Understood.


----------



## CapnPrep

Abu Rashid said:


> CapnPrep said:
> 
> 
> 
> In the examples I mentioned, the correspondance always goes in one direction: Classical/MSA ẓ corresponds to urban dialectal ḍ. If it's just a matter of "inconsistency" or "confusion", you should be able to find a comparable number of examples where the dialectal form has ẓ while MSA has ḍ.
> 
> 
> 
> Isn't that what I just did?
Click to expand...

Um, no, not if you're referring to your four Egyptian words (ẓarif, lafeẓ, niẓam, hafiẓ). As far as I know, these also have ظ in MSA, so they are not what I had in mind. rayloom provided one relevant example in MSA ضبط vs. dialectal ظبط. Are there many more like this?


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## Abu Rashid

^Sorry misunderstood your post.

I provided examples where Egyptian DOESN'T have ḍ for ẓ, thereby showing the claim it is always ḍ in urban dialects is false. That's all I was saying, that this part of the article was wrong.



berndf said:


> It actually would. Systematic rearrangement of graphemes..



Right, but it's not systematic, it's quite haphazard, that's my point. It occurs in only a handful of cases, and the other examples given like a merger in OSA languages or an instance of a confusion in ONA do not really strengthen the argument either.


----------



## berndf

^I would consider this systematic:


rayloom said:


> The Classical/MSA is ظلم (with a ẓ).   The root carries two main meanings: "dark" and "injustice".   Interestingly, in Urban dialects, derivations of this root with the   meaning "dark" are with a ض ḍ, while derivations with the meaning of "injustice" have a ẓ.


----------



## rayloom

CapnPrep said:


> rayloom provided one relevant example in MSA ضبط vs. dialectal ظبط. Are there many more like this?



Hmm can't say there are many more like this, another example that springs to mind:
Classical/MSA root ضرط, which becomes ظرط in Urban dialects of Arabic (and rural/bedouin of course).



berndf said:


> I would consider this systematic:
> 
> 
> rayloom said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The Classical/MSA is ظلم (with a ẓ).  The  root carries two main meanings: "dark" and "injustice".  Interestingly,  in Urban dialects, derivations of this root with the  meaning "dark" are  with a ض ḍ, while derivations with the meaning of "injustice" have a ẓ.
Click to expand...


Also another example of a "phonemic split" in the Urban dialects, Classical/MSA root عظم, which has 2 basic meanings "bone" & "greatness".
All derivations related to "greatness" retain the ẓ phoneme, while derivations of "bone" have a ḍ.
3aẓama (greatness) vs. 3aḍma (a bone)
3iẓaam (greats) vs. 3iḍaam (bones)
...etc


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## CapnPrep

Abu Rashid said:


> Unless all words merged, then no merger occurred.


Indeed, sounds changes are exceptionless… as long as we don't look at the exceptions.  In reality, sound changes do not affect the entire lexicon of the language simultaneously and uniformly, and it is typical for some types of vocabulary — in particular, technical terms (legal, scientific, religious) and other learned vocabulary — to remain untouched or to be only incompletely or temporarily affected. This doesn't mean that there was no sound change. It means that the effects of the change will be more apparent in basic, everyday vocabulary — kinship terms, body parts, names of animals, plants, geographical features, basic adjectives like "good, bad, big, small", basic verbs like "eat, sleep, drink, cry", etc. For example, in rayloom's examples, "dark" and "bone" belong to the core vocabulary, and it is here that we observe the ẓ > ḍ merger. When the same roots mean "injustice" and "greatness", they could be learned vocabulary (or re-borrowings from fus7a), and thus resist the merger and retain ẓ.

If you want to say that there was no dialectal merger, then — as I said before — you should look for examples of core vocabulary for which fus7a influence can be discounted, and which nevertheless feature ẓ.


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## Abu Rashid

rayloom said:


> Hmm can't say there are many more like this, another example that springs to mind:
> Classical/MSA root ضرط, which becomes ظرط in Urban dialects of Arabic (and rural/bedouin of course).



I find it interesting that like with the naddaafa/nazzaara example, this one also seems to be two words that share a lot of similarities, specifically the final emphatic in this case.

It seems to me that it's almost like these words just feel more comfortable to pronounce in the alternate manner.



rayloom said:


> Also another example of a "phonemic split" in the Urban dialects, Classical/MSA root عظم, which has 2 basic meanings "bone" & "greatness".
> All derivations related to "greatness" retain the ẓ phoneme, while derivations of "bone" have a ḍ.
> 3aẓama (greatness) vs. 3aḍma (a bone)
> 3iẓaam (greats) vs. 3iḍaam (bones)
> ...etc



This phenomena is interesting, and perhaps is peoples' way of distinguishing between two words that sound too alike. But it doesn't bolster the case of a merger of phonemes having taken place.


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## Abu Rashid

CapnPrep said:


> Indeed, sounds changes are exceptionless… as long as we don't look at the exceptions.


 
Generally speaking, for a phonemic merger to be considered as such, all ability to distinguish between the two phonemes must be completely lost, so that their difference is completely invisible to the speaker. Like the merger of s1 & s3 in Arabic. No Arabic speaker today can discern the difference between words that contain s1 and those that contain s3. To the Arabic speaker, all words simply contain the single letter "sin", the distinction is completely lost, and so a merger is said to have occurred. This is not the situation for ẓ and ḍ.



CapnPrep said:


> For example, in rayloom's examples, "dark" and "bone" belong to the core vocabulary, and it is here that we observe the ẓ > ḍ merger. When the same roots mean "injustice" and "greatness", they could be learned vocabulary (or re-borrowings from fus7a), and thus resist the merger and retain ẓ.



Both injustice and greatness are use quite frequently in Arabic, in fact I first learnt the word injustice and then found out it originated from the word for darkness. Although it is usually from a religious perspective, and I concede that could therefore explain their fus7a spelling.



CapnPrep said:


> If you want to say that there was no dialectal merger, then — as I said before — you should look for examples of core vocabulary for which fus7a influence can be discounted, and which nevertheless feature ẓ.



Yes and I have brought some. ẓareef for instance is a very "slangy" word that I mentioned above. There's also la7ẓah which is a very common word. Ma7fouẓ & 7aafiẓ are both names which are commonly used and which have this pronunciation. There's ẓill (shadow), ẓanna (to think).


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Generally speaking, for a phonemic merger to be considered as such, all ability to distinguish between the two phonemes must be completely lost, so that their difference is completely invisible to the speaker.


And this is so in many dialects.


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## CapnPrep

Abu Rashid said:


> ẓareef for instance is a very "slangy" word that I mentioned above. There's also la7ẓah which is a very common word. Ma7fouẓ & 7aafiẓ are both names which are commonly used and which have this pronunciation. There's ẓill (shadow), ẓanna (to think).


Correct me if I'm mistaken, but all of your examples still have exact counterparts in fus7a that also contain ẓ, so the possibility of borrowing/learned influence cannot be ruled out. Keep in mind that even very frequent words can turn out to be outliers from an etymological point of view. For example, the Romance languages borrowed the names of the compass directions _north_, _south_, _east_, and _west_ from Germanic. In French, the extremely ordinary words _rose_ and _école _"school" are learned forms, and _amour_ is a loanword… You can't necessarily know this just from looking at how the words are used in the language today.


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## Abu Rashid

berndf said:


> And this is so in many dialects.



It is only so in some bedouin dialects, I wouldn't say "many", and the point was the article was wrong to state urban dialects had merged both into ḍ.



CapnPrep said:


> Correct me if I'm mistaken, but all of your examples still have exact counterparts in fus7a that also contain ẓ



I'm sorry, but you've completely lost me now. You're not making any sense at all, and seem to just be drawing ever smaller goalposts each time you post. The vast majority of Arabic dialect words will of course have fus7a counterparts, those that don't are usually just loanwords, which it's highly unlikely to find one using the letter ظ.

But keeping with the 'spirit' of your arguments so far, I can think of one:

بظ يطير (buzz yateer = buzz lightyear)

Obviously when they transliterated 'buzz' into Egyptian Arabic, they considered the letter ظ to generally represent a 'z' like sound, not a 'd' like sound.

Anyway I'm done with this line of discussion, as you clearly lack the requisite knowledge of Arabic to engage in it.


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## CapnPrep

No need to apologize if you're having difficulty following, Abu Rashid. The discussion can continue without you. Meanwhile, I dug up an earlier thread in the Arabic forum that sheds some light on non-etymological ẓ in urban dialectal forms (e.g. ظبط mentioned by rayloom above):
Realizations of the ض and ظ merger in spoken Arabic


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## rayloom

Abu Rashid said:


> But it doesn't bolster the case of a merger of phonemes having taken place.



Maybe we've extended the off-topic discussion on the phonemic merger between ض & ظ.
However, the complete phonemic merger in Rural and Bedouin varieties of Arabic is quite evident. The question of a merger in Urban dialects is more difficult to demonstrate, even to prove.
The problem is that roots containing any one of these 2 phonemes are quite rare in Arabic, the ẓ being rarer (about 100 roots) , and those occuring in dialectal Arabic is even rarer (I could count about 25 ẓ roots).

Of all Classical Arabic roots containing ض ḍ, roots occuring in Urban dialects are all pronounced with a ḍ except for ضبط & ضرط (going through several dictionaries to go through all the ḍ containing roots).
On the other hand, of all Classical Arabic roots containing ظ ẓ, most are pronounced as ẓ (dialectal ẓ for that matter).

I'll list the roots:
1- Classical ẓ pronounced in Urban dialects as ẓ not ḍ:
بوظ to become rotten/spoilt (Egyptian Arabic, meaning quite different from Classical Arabic باظ)
بظّ to protrude (also EA, also meaning quite different from Classical Arabic)
حظ luck
نظر to look/wait, interestingly some derivations have a ḍ, naḍḍaara (glasses), naaḍuur (telescope), the rest are with a ẓ. Although in Lebanese Arabic, the basic verb form and its derivations are with a ṭ --> naṭar (to wait), naaṭir (active particple, waiting)...etc.
حفظ to preserve/guard/save...etc. Interestingly, some derivations occur with a ḍ Haffaaḍa (diaper)
فظع used mostly as فظيع horrible, cool (slang)
ظن to think
لحظ to notice, also لحظة is used for "moment"
ظرف circumstance, envelope
غيظ to enrage
لفظ to utter/pronounce...nouns from this root are quite commonly used in dialectal Arabic
نظم to arrange
غلظ to toughen
وعظ to preach, can be said to be learned vocabulary
كظم to suppress (one's anger), (learned vocabulary)
حظر to ban (learned vocabulary)
شظية splint/fragment (learned vocabulary)
وظف to function (probably borrowed from MSA for وظيفة function, job and وظّف to employ and its derivations)
وظب to persist (learned vocabulary)

2- Classical ẓ becomes a ḍ:
نظف to clean, occurs invariably with a ḍ.
ظفر has multiple meanings in Classical Arabic, in Urban dialects it's  mostly used for the meaning "nail" (human nail), and occurs with a ḍ.

3- mix (vs. confustion vs. reborrowing vs. phonemic split):
ظلم (mentioned before)
عظم (mentioned before)
ظل to remain/shadow. The basic meaning "shadow" shows a confusion between ẓ and ḍ sometimes within the same Urban dialect. The meaning "to remain", mostly used in Levantine Arabic, occurs with a ḍ.
ظهر has 2 main meanings, "to show" and "back" (also "noon" Classical ẓuhr). "back" and "noon" are with a ḍ, while the verbal form and its derivatives have a ẓ.

Back to the main topic, which is the historical pronunciation of ض, the reason for such debate is that even ancient Arab grammarians and linguists have commented on the shift of pronunciation. And these people have actually lived through such a period, and witnessed the phenomenon first-hand. That explains the abundance of their writings on the subject.
They have also commented on the ض ظ merger in some Urban centers, and they have commented on الضاد المصرية the Egyptian Dad, which they described as an emphatic d, and which (to them) diferred from the Classical Dad. Although the presence of an Egyptian Dad, might mean that the Urban centers of Egypt haven't seen such a merger of ض and ظ.
Also Arab linguists have stated how the Egyptian Dad has come to be the Classical (or let's say "standard") pronunciation of the Dad. Certainly if you go to the earliest writings in Arabic phonology, you have Al-Farahidi (Sibawayh's teacher) who lists the Dad with the ج and ش as being pronounced from the same area in the mouth, which isn't the case for the "modern standard" pronunciation of the ض.


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## Abu Rashid

rayloom said:


> However, the complete phonemic merger in Rural and Bedouin varieties of Arabic is quite evident.


 
No disagreement has been raised on that. This is, as you say, quite evident.



rayloom said:


> The question of a merger in Urban dialects is more difficult to demonstrate, even to prove.



I think you've shown this quite well with your list below. I was tempted to also list all words, as there isn't a great deal of them, and am thankful you beat me to it. Clearly no such merger occurred in urban dialects (well definitely not the main ones), and on this point the article berndf linked to is obviously quite mistaken. I think the article has been quite well discredited not just on this point, but also because of the flawed reliance on a merger in OSA.


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## WadiH

Abu Rashid said:


> No disagreement has been raised on that. This is, as you say, quite evident.



You said it only happened in "many" but not all bedouin/rural dialects, but that is not the case. There is not a single bedouin dialect that distinguishes the two.



> I think you've shown this quite well with your list below. I was tempted to also list all words, as there isn't a great deal of them, and am thankful you beat me to it. Clearly no such merger occurred in urban dialects (well definitely not the main ones), and on this point the article berndf linked to is obviously quite mistaken. I think the article has been quite well discredited not just on this point, but also because of the flawed reliance on a merger in OSA.



The merger was complete in the urban dialects. The presence of the emphatic [z] realization ([Z]) is a recent development that occurs in MSA borrowings or in words that are perceived or treated as MSA borrowings (thus replacing the older [D] realization in such words). A similar phenomenon can be observed in Saudi Arabia with the _qaf. _Traditional dialects in Saudi Arabia do not distinguish between [q] and [g]: _qaf_ is ALWAYS [g]. But, with the advent of mass education and mass media, [q] is used rather than [g] in MSA words but also in "higher" words such as _qaaDi_ which used to be pronounced with a [g]. This recent split cannot be treated as evidence of how the language was spoken in older times. By the way, in n the Qatif dialect, _Zaa _is still realized as [D] in all words (they do not have the [Z] phenomenon you find in Egypt and the Levant).

I am familiar with the "2yD" inscription Rayloom mentions, but it only adds more weight to the evidence that the merger of the two phonemes began a very long time ago (many Saudis today spell "zaa" words with a "daad" even though their pronunication is still "zaa").


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## CapnPrep

rayloom said:


> Of all Classical Arabic roots containing ض ḍ, roots occuring in Urban dialects are all pronounced with a ḍ except for ضبط & ضرط (going through several dictionaries to go through all the ḍ containing roots).
> On the other hand, of all Classical Arabic roots containing ظ ẓ, most are pronounced as ẓ (dialectal ẓ for that matter).


Thank you for going to all this trouble. I assume, however, that your lists are broken down according to the modern dialectal pronunciation of the roots, right? (As opposed to the pronunciation at the time of the hypothesized merger, which is what we should be looking at, ideally.)


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## Abu Rashid

Wadi Hanifa said:


> You said it only happened in "many" but not all bedouin/rural dialects, but that is not the case. There is not a single bedouin dialect that distinguishes the two.



It's moot, since it did happen in bedouin dialects, all or some or many really doesn't make a stronger case for the other points. Kinda like saying someone was "more dead".



Wadi Hanifa said:


> The merger was complete in the urban dialects.


 
You say this with such confidence, yet the evidence for it is severely lacking. How about proving your case first?



Wadi Hanifa said:


> The presence of the emphatic [z] realization ([Z]) is a recent development that occurs in MSA borrowings or in words that are perceived or treated as MSA borrowings (thus replacing the older [D] realization in such words).


 
As Rayloom's list shows, if this speculation of yours were really the case, then it would mean about 90% of words with this phoneme are "MSA borrowings".



Wadi Hanifa said:


> A similar phenomenon can be observed in Saudi Arabia with the _qaf. _Traditional dialects in Saudi Arabia do not distinguish between [q] and [g]: _qaf_ is ALWAYS [g].


 
Perhaps when [q] becomes the pronunciation in about 90% of words, you can get back to us with that one.


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## CapnPrep

Abu Rashid said:


> As Rayloom's list shows, if this speculation of yours were really the case, then it would mean about 90% of words with this phoneme are "MSA borrowings".


If we widen the explanation from "recent MSA borrowings" to "influence from the prestige variety over the past 1000+ years", this result is not at all inconceivable. It must be substantiated, but it cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Besides, rayloom's list contains 29 roots/lexemes (counting the cases in the last category twice), 6 of which are pronounced with ḍ. So it's more like 80%.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> I think the article has been quite well discredited not just on this point, but also because of the flawed reliance on a merger in OSA.


There is no "flawed reliance on a merger in OSA". The author is quite careful in assessing the possible impact of the OSA merger on pre-/early Islamic Arabic (p.343-345) and there is no simplistic argument "_because OSA languages began to merge ḍ and ẓ therefore Arabic must've too_" as you claimed in #99, above.

You can disagree with his evaluation, as Rayloom did in #103, but you cannot accuse him of methodological "flaws" that would "discredit" the article.


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## WadiH

Abu Rashid said:


> It's moot, since it did happen in bedouin dialects, all or some or many really doesn't make a stronger case for the other points. Kinda like saying someone was "more dead".



It does make a difference.  If some bedouin dialects had a [D] sound, it would strengthen the case that [D] was inherited as opposed to being the result of the loss of the interdentals.



> You say this with such confidence, yet the evidence for it is severely lacking. How about proving your case first?



The evidence, as has been repeated many times in this thread and in the literature, is in the nature of the words that use [Z] as opposed to those that use [D].  Further evidence is provided by the fact that there are words that we _know _were pronounced with stops in place of the interdentals by earlier generations (by hearing them from old people) but that are now pronounced with sibilants because younger generations perceive them as Classicism or "high" words.



> As Rayloom's list shows, if this speculation of yours were really the case, then it would mean about 90% of words with this phoneme are "MSA borrowings".
> 
> Perhaps when [q] becomes the pronunciation in about 90% of words, you can get back to us with that one.



Rayloom also pointed out that the number of roots containing ظ are few as ظ is the rarest phoneme in Arabic.  So, 90% is not surprising.  You underestimate the effect of mass media and mass education.  Many widespread traits have disappeared from certain dialects in the past few decades with barely a trace so why should this be any different.  The point here is that if you compare the [g] words in the Riyadh dialect against the [D] words in the Syrian or Egyptian dialects, you'll find that they are the same types of words.  It is also the same when comparing [q] words in the Riyadh dialect with [Z] words in the Egyptian or Syrian dialects.

But really this is not the important issue that you seem to think it is and the [q]/[g] example is not even necessary.  If you scroll up, you'll find that our theory is that [D] arose from the same process that led to [th] becoming [t] and [dh] becoming [d] (i.e. the loss of the interdentals).  That is why Syrians/Egyptians/Meccans say "talaata" instead of "thalaatha" and "daa" instead of dhaa" (ذا).  But they also say "sawrah" instead of "thawrah" and "zaat" instead "dhaat" (ذات) because these last two are Classicism.  The earlier pronunciation represents the earlier layer, and the latter is superimposed on it just like [q] was superimposed on the Riyadh dialect when two generations ago it did not exist.

So, because the fact that ض and ظ are realized as sibilants in "higher" vocabulary is something that happened to all interdentals in these dialects, it is therefore exactly what we _expect_ to be the case and strengthens our theory.


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## WadiH

As an aside, one notices that the pronunciation of interdentals as sibilants only occurs in Egypt, Syria and the urban Hejaz, which are the areas with the deepest Turkish influence in the Arabic world.  Many of the natives there are of Turkish descent and those of Turkish background were predominant among the ruling and scholarly classes in Ottoman times. I believe the Turks, Persians and other non-Arabic peoples in that part of the Arab world pronounced the interdentals in Arabic borrowings as sibilants.  That may be why we see this phenomenon in that part of the Arab world whereas in the periphery where the Turkish influence was much less (the Maghreb, Qatif and parts of Yemen), this phenomenon did not develop.


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## Ibnuarabiy

Here's something that may shed some more light..,.

ۻ

This the Arwi letter which is pronounced 'zha' and another one with single dot below pronounced like a heavy L.

Talking of heavy L and following on from previous message, listen to how Turkish imams and qaris pronounce ض 

Can't post link so please check Wikipedia for Arwi, an AraboTamil script used by Tamil Muslims.


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## Fæþ Muuvd Zêrrin

There's really no reason for an argument here. The modern pharyngealized d sound in Arabic was once a lateral sound. We know this because the lateral nature was described by an early Arab grammarian, L-like sounds were sometimes used in non-Arab languages when they borrowed Arabic words with this sound, and some surviving Arabic dialects preserve a lateral pronunciation. The only reason to argue against this analysis is if you believe that the current oral traditions of reciting the Koran are perfect. This is something you cannot prove or even partially prove. It's a baseless claim centered on the sincere belief that thousands of devout Moslems must have memorized the Koran exactly the way it was first pronounced. If you're someone who's not interested in finding truth, but rather seeks to confirm pre-existing beliefs and superstitions you want to be true, then why bother engaging the world at all? I've heard of Moslem scholars who brag that they've never read any other book than the Koran. If you stick to that, you won't have to deal with the uncomfortable truth that the world is bigger and more interesting than any of our individual belief systems might teach us.


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## Ihsiin

Very admirable sentiment, but was it really worth dredging up this old thread? The evidence presented throughout this thread about the history of the pronunciation of ض is pretty conclusive in my opinion, and any unbiased peruser cannot fail to be convinced. You haven't really added anything to this thread, so why bring it up, regardless of how small-minded the arguments you pooh-pooh are?


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