# Lebanese: What do you want me to say?



## willg

Hello everyone, I would like to say "what do you want me to say"

Shu baddak inno ..........

I don't really know how it goes.


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## elroy

No "inno."

I think it would be "shuu baddak yeene 2uul?".


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## willg

What's "yeene" and how to you write it in arabic?


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## elroy

It's "me," and it's spelled إياني in MSA.


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## clevermizo

willg said:


> What's "yeene" and how to you write it in arabic?



As Elroy said it's إياني in Standard Arabic. Usually in colloquial I write it ياني. It combines with pronouns: ياني، ياك، ياكي، يانا . For example, "I want you to say": بدّي ياك تقول _badde yeek it2uul. _The long [ee] is a typical Lebanese pronunciation of ـا, where in Syrian, for example, it would just be _yaani, yaak_, etc.


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## elroy

In Palestinian it's pronounced as in MSA: "iyyaani."


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## Muwahid

clevermizo said:


> As Elroy said it's إياني in Standard Arabic. Usually in colloquial I write it ياني. It combines with pronouns: ياني، ياك، ياكي، يانا . For example, "I want you to say": بدّي ياك تقول _badde yeek it2uul. _The long [ee] is a typical Lebanese pronunciation of ـا, where in Syrian, for example, it would just be _yaani, yaak_, etc.



Can I just ask which cases would إياني be used? Does it serve a special function? I'm just trying to understand it's function if it means "me" what's the difference of just using _ana_?


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## elroy

Muwahid said:


> Can I just ask which cases would إياني be used? Does it serve a special function? I'm just trying to understand it's function if it means "me" what's the difference of just using _ana_?


 Well, "ana" is nominative and disjunctive so it can't be used if the pronoun is in the objective case.

Usually, for the objective case you use a pronoun suffix, which is "-ni" for the first person singular.

However, this is not always possible.  "-Ni" cannot be attached to "biddak" (Lebanese "baddak"), and that necessitates the use of the "unattached" object pronoun, which is "iyyaani" (Lebanese "yeene").  Does that make sense?  In effect, "-ni" and "iyyaani" mean the same thing, but "iyyaani" is used when "-ni" can't be used for morphological reasons.

Another example would be "He gave it to me."  Here, we have two object pronouns, "it" and "me," but in Levantine Arabic, you can't attach two pronoun suffixes to one verb, so you can't say "a3taani-o"* or anything like that.  So we say "a3taani 'yyaa."  "-Ni" is a pronoun suffix while "iyyaa" is a regular object pronoun.


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## Muwahid

So in other words this would mainly be used with ditransitive verbs that take both a direct and indirect object then? Thus ايا/ني/ه/ها acts as a pronoun where you want to say me/him(it)/her(it)/etc for the second object? Then would this be correct for _Give me it! _أعطني إياه? Ir am I still missing something here?

A thousand thank-yous


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## elroy

You got it.   أعطني إياه is MSA, though; in Levantine it would be أعطيني اياه.


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## willg

Thank you so much, but I still have one doubt. Wouldn't you say "shu baddak yeeni a2uul" instead of 2uul, if you are conjugating the verb?


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## Muwahid

I'm pretty sure the dialect omits the أ in the first person So it's قول for "I say" instead of أقول. But I'm not sure.


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## clevermizo

That's correct. In Lebanese and Syrian Arabic when a verb has a long vowel in the root, like raa7, shaaf, 2aal, the first person in the present tense does not have a hamza prefix. It's just 'ruu7', 'shuuf', '2uul.'  For example, " I want to see" - biddi/badde shuuf, "I want to go" - biddi/badde ruu7, etc.


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## willg

Again thank you so much!


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## Sidjanga

Hi,

So I understand that إياني, إياك, إلخ is not optional and that it would be wrong/unidiomatic to just say شو بدك أقول؟, correct?


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## clevermizo

Sidjanga said:


> Hi,
> 
> So I understand that إياني, إياك, إلخ is not optional and that it would be wrong/unidiomatic to just say شو بدك أقول؟, correct?



I've always heard the structure with the pronoun.


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## elroy

clevermizo said:


> I've always heard the structure with the pronoun.


 شو بدك أقول؟ sounds fine to me.


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## Sidjanga

Good to know.





elroy said:


> شو بدك أقول؟ sounds fine to me.


So what's the difference between the two? Is شو بدك إياني أقول just somehow more emphatic, in that it's _me _you want to say something?


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## elroy

There's no difference.


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