# Dialects that pronounce ش the same as س



## Drink

Which dialects pronounce ش the same as س? I think I have heard that there are such dialects.


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## HACHEM HUMAID

to some extent, you should be mistaken !  

I've never heared someone talks by the way you mentioned but that might be really exist !


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## Hemza

Do you mean dialects which replaces the س by the ش or vice-versa? If it is your question, then in Morocco there is a city (Meknès) in which people for example pronounce سمس instead of شمس.

Also, the Arabic spoken by the Moroccans jews differs on this compared to the Moroccans muslims one: while a muslim would say اسمع, a jew says اشمع.

I don't know if this latter also occurs/occured in Algeria, Tunisia or Libya.


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## Drink

Hemza said:


> Do you mean dialects which replaces the س by the ش or vice-versa? If it is your question, then in Morocco there is a city (Meknès) in which people for example pronounce سمس instead of شمس.



Actually, it doesn't really matter. What tends to happen is that when two sounds merge, they actually end up somewhere in the middle, often with some people pronouncing it closer to one of the original sounds, and others pronouncing it closer to the other.



Hemza said:


> Also, the Arabic spoken by the Moroccans jews differs on this compared to the Moroccans muslims one: while a muslim would say اسمع, a jew says اشمع.
> 
> I have no other example of such shift.



Interesting. Actually the reason I asked this question is because among other Jews, Moroccan Jews are known for not being able to pronounce the "sh" sound (they usually pronounce it close to "s"), so it's interesting that your perception is the exact opposite.

Thanks for the answer!


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## Hemza

Drink said:


> Actually, it doesn't really matter. What tends to happen is that when two sounds merge, they actually end up somewhere in the middle, often with some people pronouncing it closer to one of the original sounds, and others pronouncing it closer to the other.



You're welcome. Well in this case, there are areas (Asia) where the 2nd person feminine ending (which is normally "ik" in Standard Arabic) is "تش" and in some others, it's "تس". I think this latter occurs in some Najdi and Hijazi (Saudi Arabia) dialects (but is I think disappearing among youngers) while the تش still widely used accross the Gulf, in Iraq and Jordan.



Drink said:


> Interesting. Actually the reason I asked this question is because Moroccan Jews are known for not being able to pronounce the "sh" sound (they usually pronounce it close to "s"), so it's interesting that your perception is the exact opposite.
> 
> Thanks for the answer!



Not able to pronounce it? In Arabic? Well it's rather the opposite . If you're talking about modern Hebrew, I have no idea, sorry.

Ps: oddly, they pronounce the ص as everyone else.


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## tounsi51

In North Africa شمس tends to be pronounced شمش or سمش

Hemza may have other examples


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## analeeh

Drink said:


> Actually, it doesn't really matter. What tends to happen is that when two sounds merge, they actually end up somewhere in the middle, often with some people pronouncing it closer to one of the original sounds, and others pronouncing it closer to the other.



Perhaps you're talking about a specific case, but linguistically speaking (and even within Arabic) this is rarely the case. See ث ذ ظ in Levantine, for example.

There are lots of cases of s and sh moving around a bit within the Arabic-speaking world. The north African case of _shams_ is simple assimilation of sh to s (or vice-versa) and happens in a few words. We might also mention here Syrian _soofaaj_ (central heating < French _chauffage_) and _sajara_ (_= shajara_). 

The only case I know of it happening consistently though is in Jewish dialects of North Africa (specifically Tunisia, as you've mentioned) where sh > s. I don't know if any of these dialects are still alive, though.


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## Drink

Hemza said:


> Not able to pronounce it? In Arabic? Well it's rather the opposite . If you're talking about modern Hebrew, I have no idea, sorry.



No not in Arabic. I've mostly heard it in connection with Hebrew, but I presume it would apply to English as well. What I mean is that in Moroccan Jewish Arabic I presume they have one sound for both ش and س, and this sound probably sounds like "sh" to other Arabs, but sounds more like "s" to speakers of Hebrew and English.



analeeh said:


> Perhaps you're talking about a specific case, but linguistically speaking (and even within Arabic) this is rarely the case. See ث ذ ظ in Levantine, for example.



On the contrary, there are numerous linguistic examples of this. If you examine languages that do not have a "sh" sound, you will notice that their "s" sound has a lot of dialectal or idiolectal variation, sometimes approaching "sh" (this is the case, for example, in Spanish, Dutch, and Modern Greek). Since you mention ظ, this is actually another great example. In some dialects like Levantine, both ض and ظ are pronounced as a plosive, while in others they are both pronounced as a fricative.


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## analeeh

Drink said:


> On the contrary, there are numerous linguistic examples of this. If you examine languages that do not have a "sh" sound, you will notice that their "s" sound has a lot of dialectal or idiolectal variation, sometimes approaching "sh" (this is the case, for example, in Spanish, Dutch, and Modern Greek). Since you mention ظ, this is actually another great example. In some dialects like Levantine, both ض and ظ are pronounced as a plosive, while in others they are both pronounced as a fricative.



This is a different phenomenon altogether - sure, if there's no phonemic distinction between s and S in a language there's plenty more phonetic space for s to move around in and display allophonic or, for example, regional variation. But this is different from the result of a merger of two phonemes meeting in the middle. In both cases of the merger of ض ظ the merger goes one way - either the stop merges with the fricative or the fricative merges with the stop. They don't meet in the middle as an affricate or something. Likewise, ث ذ merge straightforwardly either to t d or s z in all of the languages I can think of where this merger happens - the two sounds don't move towards one another, one collapses into the other.


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## Drink

Firstly, I said "what _tends_ to happen". Secondly, in this case, there is a physical restriction in that there is nothing "between" a fricative and a stop. However, in cases where there is physically a continuum between the two sounds, then what I said usually applies.


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## analeeh

But it is also incorrect to say 'what tends to happen'. There probably are cases of mergers of two sounds producing a resultant sound that is somewhere in between (i u merger in Syrian Arabic). But what tends to happen when two sounds merge is that one of them loses whatever distinction (POA, MOA, voicing, whatever) that distinguishes it from another sound and collapses (conditionally or unconditionally) into the other sound, phonemically and phonetically. 

An affricate is somewhere between a fricative and a stop, but we don't see fricatives and stops both merging to affricates.


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## Drink

analeeh said:


> But it is also incorrect to say 'what tends to happen'. There probably are cases of mergers of two sounds producing a resultant sound that is somewhere in between (i u merger in Syrian Arabic). But what tends to happen when two sounds merge is that one of them loses whatever distinction (POA, MOA, voicing, whatever) that distinguishes it from another sound and collapses (conditionally or unconditionally) into the other sound, phonemically and phonetically.



I think you are saying the exact same thing I said, but in a different (and perhaps more accurate) way.



analeeh said:


> An affricate is somewhere between a fricative and a stop, but we don't see fricatives and stops both merging to affricates.



I wouldn't quite agree that an affricate is "between" a fricative and a stop.


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## Hemza

Drink said:


> No not in Arabic. I've mostly heard it in connection with Hebrew, but I presume it would apply to English as well. What I mean is that in Moroccan Jewish Arabic I presume they have one sound for both ش and س, and this sound probably sounds like "sh" to other Arabs, but sounds more like "s" to speakers of Hebrew and English.



Well, we're all humans and all have pretty much the same ears . The sound use by the dialects spoken by the jews for the "س" is often "ش" so I can't see how it could be heard as a "s" by others, I mean except if the "sh" in Hebrew or English are very harsh which I don't think they are.
Here two examples (note this is also the case for some dialects spoken by muslims so it's hard to be accurate):
اسمع is pronounced by the jews اشمع
نبي موسى is pronounced نبي موشى

But I can't assure you that all jews talk(ed) the same way, because those who came from Spain/Portugal might have/had a different accent from the native (I mean at the end of the 15th century) Moroccan jews but as I was born in the 90's and not even in Morocco... 

Note also that there is a specific case in Morocco with an odd pronounciation of the ش and the ج, it's the city of Meknès (there, it becomes س and ز), but as I'm not from there, I don't know if both Muslims and Jews had this odd pronounciation or if it's only the Muslims (while Jews would talk as other Jews of Morocco). And to make things harder, the "ج" turning into "ز" also exists in Tunisia, but Tounsi51 will be a more accurate than me.


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## Drink

Hemza said:


> Well, we're all humans and all have pretty much the same ears . The sound use by the dialects spoken by the jews for the "س" is often "ش" so I can't see how it could be heard as a "s" by others, I mean except if the "sh" in Hebrew or English are very harsh which I don't think they are.



It's all about expectations and contrast. If the actual sound is between "s" and "sh", and you expect to hear "s" (as you would in the word اسمع), you might hear it as "sh", but if you expect to hear "sh", you might hear it as "s". This is a common phenomenon. But I do suspect that the reason the Moroccan Jews speak that way is because their former language Ladino (i.e. Judeo-Spanish) did not distinguish "s" and "sh" either.


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## Hemza

Drink said:


> It's all about expectations and contrast. If the actual sound is between "s" and "sh", and you expect to hear "s" (as you would in the word اسمع), you might hear it as "sh", but if you expect to hear "sh", you might hear it as "s". This is a common phenomenon. But I do suspect that the reason the Moroccan Jews speak that way is because their former language Ladino (i.e. Judeo-Spanish) did not distinguish "s" and "sh" either.



Not all Moroccan jews came from Spain/Portugal, many of them were in Morocco way before. Also, most of Moroccan jews who came from the Iberian peninsula settled in Northern cities (Fès, Meknès, Tangiers, Tetouan). So what about rural Arabic speakers? (I'm not talking about the Berber speakers). It's hard to determine why their speech is different.

If you understand Moroccan arabic, type on youtube "فين ماشي يا موشى؟" (choose the video called "film Marocain fine machi yamoche complete") and focus on the speech of the old man with the hat (the main protagonist). He's a Moroccan jews and as his family (in the film) he pronounces in the jewish way.


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## Drink

Hemza said:


> Not all Moroccan jews came from Spain/Portugal, many of them were in Morocco way before. Also, most of Moroccan jews who came from the Iberian peninsula settled in Northern cities (Fès, Meknès, Tangiers, Tetouan). So what about rural Arabic speakers? (I'm not talking about the Berber speakers). It's hard to determine why their speech is different.



As with other places where the Spanish Jews ended up, they came in such large numbers that they almost completely displaced the former local Jewish traditions and speech (but of course, some vestiges always remained). This is true all the way from Morocco to Iraq.


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## Hemza

True (although I didn't know some of them ended in Syria/Iraq from Spain, it's quite far away). We should wait for informations from Algerians and Tunisians (or even Libyans if there are on the forum) to know about the situation of the jewish speech(es) in these countries because I have no idea.


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## Drink

Hemza said:


> True (although I didn't know some of them ended in Syria/Iraq from Spain, it's quite far away).



Basically in the times of the Ottoman Empire, many of them moved to Turkey, and from there they basically spread throughout Empire. But even before that, Maimonides (1135-1204), for example, was born in Cordoba, Spain, then moved to Morocco, then moved to Egypt; Nahmanides (1194-1270) was born in Spain (Girona) and died in the Land of Israel. I guess Spanish Jews just had a tendency to move East.

As an extreme example, Ibn Ezra (1089-1167) was born in Tudela, Spain, and to quote Wikipedia "led a life of restless wandering, which took him to North Africa, Egypt (in 1109, maybe in the company of Yehuda Halevi), the Land of Israel, Italy (Rome in 1140–1143, Lucca, Mantua, Verona), Southern France (Narbonne, Béziers), Northern France (Rouen), England (London, and Oxford in 1158), and back again to Narbonne in 1161, until his death on January 23 or 28, 1167, the exact location unknown."


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## Hemza

Mmm in my humble opinion, your examples aren't representative because first, those were either writers, travellers at least, famous people. And they travelled before the expulsion of the Muslims and the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. When you undergo expulsion, you flee to the nearest place which was current day Morocco and Algeria. And I think the majority of them settled in Morocco as shown by the number of jewish Moroccans compared to their Algerian/Tunisian fellows. Don't take me wrong, I'm not saying no one went to Western Asia/Turkey but I don't think that a big number of them went there. I might be wrong of course, what I say is just based on my feeling and knowledge.


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## Drink

You're right that my examples are not representative, I just thought they would be interesting. Anyway, you should read the "Divisions" section of Wikipedia's article on Sephardi Jews. It basically explains how, out of the Jews who left Spain in 1492, many went west to Portugal (where they were then trapped by a similar edict in 1496, except that it didn't allow them to leave), many went south to Morocco, and many went north and east (since they weren't accepted in France) into Italy, Greece, the Balkans, and Turkey. I don't know the numbers, but I would guess that the proportions of Jews that went in each of those three directions were roughly equal. It goes on to say: "Some went further east to territories of the Ottoman Empire, settling among the long-established Arabic-speaking Jewish communities in Baghdad in Iraq, Damascus and Aleppo in Syria, and Alexandria in Egypt. ... While the communities in Syria and Egypt are partly of Spanish origin, the communities in Iraq, Iran, Eastern Syria, Yemen and Eastern Turkey are largely indigenous populations who have adopted Sephardic rite and some of its traditions."


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## Hemza

Of course, your example are still interesting and welcomed . Don't forgot about the Bahraini jews (who were mainly from Iraq and present day Kuwait I think) and those who were from Saudi Arabia. But it is another topic.


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## Drink

By the way, I was just reading the Wikipedia article on Judeo-Berber, and it says: "these [Jewish] varieties [of Berber] are distinguished by the use of Hebrew loanwords and the pronunciation of _š_ as _s_ (as in many Jewish Moroccan Arabic dialects)."


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## Hemza

I don't think it is only the case in Morocco, it is probably the case for Algerian Berber speakers (if they still exist), Tunisians and Libyans. Also, the language you use for religious purpose influence your own daily life languages, exactly how Arabic influenced Muslim Berbers speakers and how many other languages who are spoken where Islam is the faith (the same goes with Latin for Catholics for example).


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