# Damascene Arabic: schwa [ə]



## WannaBFluent

السلام عليكم

I have a doubt about something I read in a book. It is about the /ə/ sound in Damascene. They say it is a sound like the 'u' in "murder" or the 'e' in "her" or as in the French words "fleur" and "seul". Is this true?

I'm quite skeptical because they gave some example like :

2əmmi btəfta7 iš-šəbbaak
My mother opens the window

While I would expect a Damascene to say :

2ommi btefta7 éš-šobbaak
or maybe šebbaak.
(So according to me, they failed the /i/ sound in the article ال and the /ə/ sound).

I have also tried to pay attention to the pronounciation watching series from Damas, and I did not hear any /ə/ sounds in their speech.
What do you guys think?

شكرا


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## analeeh

It's almost never a schwa, if at all. It's written like a schwa, but this pronunciation is rare. Its realisation varies quite a lot depending on the surrounding consonants, as well as on the specific dialect. Its presence or absence in a word is also not predictable - historically it resulted from the merger of u and i in stressed syllables, but these sounds have been restored in lots of words thanks to MSA influence.

In your example, I would pronounce all four (including in él-) as something close to 'i': _immi btifta7 ish-shibbaak_. But there are other contexts where it is pronounced closer to the sound you're talking about - _2éddaam_ for example doesn't quite have a schwa, I don't think, but something similar and quite centralised. Likewise the sound in _Téle3_. Generally speaking, it has more centralised pronunciations near to the sort of letters which normally trigger a back pronunciation of /a/. There are other cases which I don't entirely understand - _mohémm_ for example is pronounced with a centralised, high-ish back vowel (so it sounds like mohumm), but _bihémm_, from the same root and with an almost identical structure, is pronounced like _bihimm_. It would take quite a lot of effort to work out exactly what's going on in all of these and when the vowel is realised as what.

This vowel merger has a lot of annoying consequences for short vowels, incidentally. A stress shift to a short u/i/o/e or a shortening of a long uu or ii both result in mergers. So even though _bi2uul _and_ bishiil_ have distinct vowels, with a dative suffix they no longer do: _bi2él-lak_ and _bishél-lak_. Likewise, _byéktob _becomes, for example, _byéktéb-lak_ or _byéktéb-ha_.


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## WannaBFluent

So the transliteration provided by my book is not accurate and does not reflect the real diversity of the short vowels pronunciation?

By the way, Damascenes really pronounce ال like /il/?
Because the /i/ sound looks Lebanese to me. But I might be wrong, my level in Arabic is not good.


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## elroy

You might find this interesting: https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS2015/Papers/ICPHS0612.pdf

This part in particular seems relevant:

_The quality of the schwa is described as depending, to a large extent, on that of neighbouring sounds. The schwa is the only sound that has no long counterpart; and it never occurs word finally, which suggest that the schwa has an underlying form, which can be one of the other short vowels. One could argue that, due to coarticulation effects, short vowels tend to centralise and surface in the form of a schwa because short (lax) vowels are affected by the surrounding context more easily than long (tense) vowels [22]. Gairdner [13] describes the Arabic schwa as a „vague vowel‟ which can replace short vowels in rapid speech. _


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## analeeh

WannaBFluent said:


> So the transliteration provided by my book is not accurate and does not reflect the real diversity of the short vowels pronunciation?



No - it's a phonemic transcription, which is to say, all these different pronunciations are perceived by native speakers to be one 'meaningful' sound (phoneme). The problem is that this phoneme has a lot of different realisations, and although it is typically written as a schwa it is rarely pronounced as one.



> By the way, Damascenes really pronounce ال like /il/?
> Because the /i/ sound looks Lebanese to me. But I might be wrong, my level in Arabic is not good.



They pronounce it, I think, with the same vowel as appears in stressed syllables - that is, it has a lot of different realisations, one of which sounds like il-.


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## WannaBFluent

elroy said:


> _Gairdner [13] describes the Arabic schwa as a „vague vowel‟ which can replace short vowels in rapid speech. _


In other words, the schwa sound does not really exist in Arabic but as it is close to an /a/ or /o/ or even /e/ short sound, the schwa can replace those sounds if there are short in a fast speech.

Like 2ommi can be said 2əmmi in a fast speech, but well... it can be said without being noticed by the listeners. Or the listeners will hear it, but automatically correct it to 2ommi in their head.

In fact, I'm still skeptical, because I feel like ə is an "error" of speech.


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## analeeh

No, no - that's talking about the 'Arabic' schwa in general, and not about the phoneme characteristic of Syrian and Lebanese dialects.

You must have noticed, for example, that Damascenes pronounce _kunt_ as something that sounds like _kint, _or that they pronounce _ummi_ as something like _immi_? I don't know what TV series you've been watching, but this is a very standard feature of Syrian, and one well-attested in linguistic literature. If you can get your hands on a copy of _A Reference Grammar of Syrian Arabic_ - or even if you look in whichever textbook it was that encouraged you to write il as él - it should have an explanation of this phenomenon.


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## elroy

I'm curious about how all this compares with Palestinian Arabic.  Ever since I discovered that Syrian was apparently distinctive compared to other Levantine dialects for having a schwa, I assumed it was a well-defined vowel sound.  (I had never heard of it being associated with Lebanese until your #7, analeeh.)  I'm not very good at perceiving subtle phonetic differences between sounds in the languages I acquired naturalistically (Arabic and English), so I just took that at face value.  Now that you say it's not straightforward, I wonder if it's also not straightforward in Palestinian, and whether there's more overlap than I had previously thought when it comes to the vowels that are realized in Syrian as any version of the schwa sound?

I just did some googling and didn't find anything supporting the existence of schwa in Palestinian Arabic, but I wonder if the Syrian schwa is sometimes realized the same as the corresponding vowel in Palestinian?


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## analeeh

Yeah, it is - phonetically it's very rarely a schwa, so Palestinian and Syrian pronunciations of أمي or جبنة are actually very similar _phonetically, _as are, for example, pronunciations of حطّ. There is a third main realisation of this vowel which is somewhat schwa-like which you can hear, for example, in Syrian and Lebanese pronunciations of قدام or كرمال. But with regard to u or i, the difference is that in Palestinian the i and the u are phonemically distinct and can appear anywhere, whereas in the northern Levant most urban dialects historically merged the two vowels in stressed syllables. This is why you get _kint and shift_, for example - or, the opposite way around, why you get _mohumm_ instead of _mohimm_ (supposedly, anyway). 

Some of the forms which deviate from MSA (_jibne, imm_) are also found in southern Levantine dialects. This might just be inter-dialect borrowing, or it might be linked to the broader phenomenon of i-u interchangeability in Classical Arabic which other people have written about.


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## elroy

Can you give the pronunciations you're referring to?

I say [imm], [jibne], [7uTT], [2uddaam], [kurmaal], [kunet], [shufet], and [muhimm].

How are these the same or different from the corresponding pronunciations in Syrian and Lebanese? 

Here is a recording of me pronouncing these words.  Which of the vowel sounds we're discussing are the same in Syrian and Lebanese, and which ones are different - and how?  

I should note, in case it matters, that although I grew up in Jerusalem my pronunciation is Galilean-influenced to a certain extent so it's closer to Syrian and Lebanese than many Palestinian dialects (but still distinctly Palestinian).  I am often mistaken by Arabs from outside the Levant for a Lebanese guy.


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## analeeh

These are, in Damascene, something like:

[Im:], [ZIbne], [Hot:_k], [2Ed:a:m], [kErma:l], [kInEt], [SEfEt~SIfEt] and [mohUm:].

But the important thing is that phonemically they all have the same vowel.


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## elroy

I don't understand [Hot:_k].  Did did you mean [HOT:]?  (It looks like you capitalized the vowel in question.)

Do you know on what linguistic grounds this is treated as just one phoneme, even though the phonetic realizations are so drastically different?


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## analeeh

[HOt_k\:]. As in, a velarised t which is also doubled. (I'm writing X-SAMPA because I don't have ready access to IPA here).

On the grounds that its distribution is entirely predictable, and that it's never contrastive - the normal grounds to treat something as a phoneme. I'm actually sliiiightly skeptical of this as an approach, because actually I'm not sure their distributions _are_ entirely predictable - but morphologically you can demonstrate it as a synchronic process, like the one I showed above:

"So even though _bi2uul _and_ bishiil_ have distinct vowels, with a dative suffix they no longer do: _bi2él-lak_ and _bishél-lak_. Likewise, _byéktob _becomes, for example, _byéktéb-lak_ or _byéktéb-ha_."


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## be.010

In Damascene and some other Syrian dialects, I think the sound you're referring to is closer to short schwa than any other vowel. Here I've recorded the same words that Elroy sent earlier but this time in Damascene.


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## WannaBFluent

Here what they said in 'A Reference Grammar of Syrian Arabic' about the schwa (click to zoom)







But I still don't understand why the book 'Integrated Arabic اهلا و سهلا Syrian Colloquial, a functional Course' by Mary-Jane Liddicoat, Richard Lennane and Iman Abdul Rahim, renowned to be the 'best Syrian Colloquial Arabic course' never talks about the schwa...


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## analeeh

be.010 said:


> In Damascene and some other Syrian dialects, I think the sound you're referring to is closer to short schwa than any other vowel. Here I've recorded the same words that Elroy sent earlier but this time in Damascene.



You don't say mohumm like a lot of people do - you pronounce it with the same vowel as in بيهم. That's interesting and makes me think mohumm might actually be an exception, perhaps influenced by the Turkish pronunciation or something.


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## momai

Here is a record by me(Salamieh-Hama).


WannaBFluent said:


> They say it is a sound like the 'u' in "murder" or the 'e' in "her"


I also think that the realisation of u sound in these words is the closest to the damscene pronunciation


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## WannaBFluent

السلام عليكم يا موماي

How would you describe this phenomenon of using the ə? Do you know where does it come from?
And is it used everywhere in the country?


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## princeipeazul

WannaBFluent said:


> السلام عليكم
> 
> I have a doubt about something I read in a book. It is about the /ə/ sound in Damascene. They say it is a sound like the 'u' in "murder" or the 'e' in "her" or as in the French words "fleur" and "seul". Is this true?
> 
> I'm quite skeptical because they gave some example like :
> 
> 2əmmi btəfta7 iš-šəbbaak
> My mother opens the window
> 
> While I would expect a Damascene to say :
> 
> 2ommi btefta7 éš-šobbaak
> or maybe šebbaak.
> (So according to me, they failed the /i/ sound in the article ال and the /ə/ sound).
> 
> I have also tried to pay attention to the pronounciation watching series from Damas, and I did not hear any /ə/ sounds in their speech.
> What do you guys think?
> 
> شكرا


Click to this link to listen to the sample audio of the schwa Mid central vowel - Wikipedia


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