I traditionally start my phonetics courses with an "over-under bet", about how much randomly-selected audio we need to listen to (and look at), before we find a systematic, interesting, and essentially unstudied phenomenon. In the case of English, I generally offer 20 seconds as the threshold value — for less well-studied languages like French or Chinese, the threshold might be 10 seconds. For understudied languages, 3 seconds.
Here's the first bit of the show (a little less than 12 seconds):
This is Fresh Air.
Our book critic Maureen Corrigan says
Julia May Jonas's new first novel,
called Vladímír,
should spark a lot of heated discussions
on today's campuses.
And the first interesting-and-unstudied phenomenon turns up after about 6.2 seconds:
We've just been through the problems of standard language versus the vernaculars in Arabic (see "Selected readings" below). Now we're going to look at a photograph, a caption, a book review, and a letter to the editor that encompass these contentious issues in spades — but for Chinese. Here's the photograph:
Susan Blum, Lies That Bind: Chinese Truth, Other Truths (Rowman, 2007), p. 130:
…Though language was viewed as having pragmatic consequences in the past, during revolutionary China and especially during the Cultural Revolution the social effects of language were consciously emphasized, as an entire propaganda department took over the government. All words and communication were politically charged, and people had to become completely conscious of the effects of their utterances, knowing they would be scrutinized. At the same time, a premium was placed on the spontaneous eruption of profound feelings of revolutionary ardor. This forced many people to pursue a path of performance, of masking feelings they could scarcely acknowledge to themselves.
Recent discussion of that most Taiwanese expletive, 潲 siâu ‘semen’ (“Hokkien in Sino-Japanese script”), made me think of a favourite item. Although Mandarin 㞞 sóng has the same literal meaning, in my experience that’s less familiar to some speakers than nouns that contain it, e.g. 㞞包 sóngbāo (literally ‘bag of semen’), roughly ‘weakling’.
Again, to refresh our collective memory and to provide the context for the present post and the other posts in this series, I repeat the following questions:
1. Is there such a thing as "Classical Arabic"? If there is, how do we describe / define it?
2. What is "Standard Arabic"?
3. What is Quranic Arabic? How different is it from Standard Arabic?
4. How many vernacular Arabic languages are there? Egyptian? Syrian? Lebanese? Are they quite different from Standard Arabic? Are they mutually intelligible? Do they customarily have written forms and a flourishing literature?
An important point to make is that the regional Arabic "colloquials" have been developing in separate directions nearly as long as the regional Romance varieties have. So Moroccan Arabic is roughly as different from Gulf Arabic as (say) French is from Portuguese….
To refresh our collective memory and to provide the context for the present post and the other posts in this series, I repeat the following questions:
1. Is there such a thing as "Classical Arabic"? If there is, how do we describe / define it?
2. What is "Standard Arabic"?
3. What is Quranic Arabic? How different is it from Standard Arabic?
4. How many vernacular Arabic languages are there? Egyptian? Syrian? Lebanese? Are they quite different from Standard Arabic? Are they mutually intelligible? Do they customarily have written forms and a flourishing literature?
—
You may also wish to revisit the introduction with which the first post in the series began. It was followed by a lively, informative discussion in the comments.
Devin Stewart offered the following illuminating response:
These are some tough questions to answer, and the answers are all going to be impressionistic, but just to give you a own sense of a few guidelines for beginning to understand the dialect situation.
Terrence Scott Kaufman was born on June 12, 1937, in Portland, Oregon, and died on March 3, 2022. He earned his B.A. at the University of Chicago in 1959, began his decades-long fieldwork career in 1960, and earned his Ph.D. degree in 1963 at the University of California, Berkeley. His Ph.D. dissertation was a grammar of Tzeltal. He taught at The Ohio State University (1963-1964) and at Berkeley (1964-1970), and then spent the rest of his teaching career at the University of Pittsburgh (1971-2011). He was a valued mentor to the many students he trained at Pitt and in his MesoAmerican documentation projects, and a dear friend to many of the rest of us. As his old friend Lyle Campbell put it recently, Terry was truly "astonishing in the breadth and depth of his knowledge of seemingly everything, of his seemingly superhuman ability as a fieldworker, picking up instantly on the most subtle of things, getting more documentation done in a week's fieldwork on a language than most others could achieve in years of effort".
With this post, I will begin a series on the nature of the Arabic group of languages. My reason for doing so is that many people are badly confused about just what "Arabic" (a Semitic group) signifies when it comes to language, almost as badly confused as most people are about "Chinese" (linguistically more properly referred to as Sinitic).
Arabic (اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ, al-ʿarabiyyah[al ʕaraˈbijːa](listen) or عَرَبِيّ, ʿarabīy[ˈʕarabiː](listen) or [ʕaraˈbij]) is a Semitic language that first emerged in the 1st to 4th centuries CE. It is the lingua franca of the Arab world and the liturgical language of Islam. It is named after the Arabs, a term initially used to describe peoples living in the Arabian Peninsula bounded by eastern Egypt in the west, Mesopotamia in the east, and the Anti-Lebanon mountains and northern Syria in the north, as perceived by ancient Greek geographers. The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic, including its standard form, Modern Standard Arabic, also referred to as Literary Arabic, which is modernized Classical Arabic. This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā (اَلعَرَبِيَّةُ ٱلْفُصْحَىٰ "the eloquent Arabic") or simply al-fuṣḥā (اَلْفُصْحَىٰ).
