Sound & Script Lesson 1

'@hl@n we sel@n, 'ASdiQAA'ii (translated hello friends, but literally "my people and easy, my friends"):

Reviewing Lesson 1 of Sound & Script, I noticed a number of things I'd like to point out:

(FIRST) The discussion of the short vowels appears inconsistent but actually it is simply incomplete.  One page 4, we are told "short vowels equate to the English short vowels /E/ as in set, /I/ as in hit, and /U/ as in put" (Capital letters substituted for IPA symbols).  Then on page 8, we are asked to "remember that the three short vowels are [equivalent to] but, put, and hit.  What just happened there you might have wondered.  The vowel sounds in "but" and "set" are totally different sounds in English!

Actually, what you need to know is that the three short vowel sounds (often seen in combination with the long vowel sounds) are pronounced in different ways depending on the context.  In short, here is the list:

The i-and-y like sound family produced by the diacritic: k@sRa (lengthened by ye)
1) ii as in "skiing"
2) i as in "ski"
3) I as in "Igloo"

The a-and-e-like sound family produced by the diacritic: f@tHa (lengthened by elif)
1) e as in "cheddar"
2) ae as in "acorn" (but pronounced more like the Spanish "e" sound)
3) @ as in "@pple" (or @t which is why I use the @ symbol for it)
4) @@ as in "@pple" (but longer in duration, which is why I double the letter)
5) a as in "onion" (or above)
6) A as in "olive" (or autumn)
7) AA as in "olive" (but longer in duration)

The u-and-w-like sound family produced by the diacritic: DAmma (lengthened by w@w)
1) uu as in "blue ooze" (doubled sound by using "...ue + oo...")
2) u as in "blues"
3) U as in "put" or "book"

For the complete set of rules that dictate when all of these different vowel sounds are used, go to the chart with the baby pictures on this webpage: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dfcrjjqs_99hfskg4dr

On that same webpage you will also find memory stories for memorizing each one of the Arabic letters.

(SECOND) The focus of the chapter on differentiating long lengthened vowel sounds from short punctuated vowel sounds seems like a very difficult place for native English speakers to begin, however, if one is going to begin at this point, it is important to know a few things:

1) First, the three so-called "long" or lengthened vowel sounds, ye, elif, and w@w never occur as vowel sounds at all unless they follow one of the short punctuated vowel sounds, k@sRa, f@tHa, or DAmma.  This is not shown in Sound and Script because the book doesn't write the diacritics most of the time, but in reality, if these letters don't follow vowels they are the consonants y, (the glottal stop) ', and w.

2) Second, to recognize these sounds when you hear them, it is going to be much easier for you as a native English speaker to distinguish the quality of the sound instead of trying to determine the length of the sound.  By that I mean it is easy for the English speaker to hear the difference between the particular "i" sounds in the words "Igloo" and in "skiing" rather than trying to always recognize the difference in duration of a particular "i" sound, as in the words "ski" and "skiing."  Based on that understanding of the native English speakers "ear" for sounds, we can establish some helpful rules to get you through to the correct answer (long vowel or short vowel) most of the time.  Here are the rules:

I) if you ever hear the sounds "I" as in Igloo, "E" as in chedder, or "U" as in book, guaranteed, 100% of the time, across dialects, this will always mean you are hearing a short punctuated vowel using ONLY the diacritic, and never the long vowel.

II) if you ever hear the sound "ae" as in acorn, this should always mean you are hearing a long lengthened vowel sound that includes the elif after the f@tHa (reminder, the f@tHa isn't noted though in Sound & Script before elif's as the want to you get use to reading words without diacritics ASAP for better or for worse).  However, the native dialect of the speaker may obscure this rule sometimes even when people are trying to speak in Modern Standard Arabic.

III) if you hear an "i/ii" sound (ski or skiing), or an "u/uu" sound (blue ooze, or blues), you don't have to guess whether is was lengthened or short if you heard it inside of a closed syllable (i.e. as syllable that ends in a consonant; for example, "me" is open, "met" is closed).  Guaranteed, 100% of the time, you heard a long lengthened sound that must include "ye" or "w@w" the so-called long vowels if you hear anything that sounds like "i" (ski) or "u" (blues) inside of a closed syllable ending with a consonant.

Those rules will cover you the majority of the time when trying to distinguish between long/lengthened and short/punctuated vowel sounds.  However, to really master this distinction 100% of the time you will eventually have know about Mora theory to arrive at perfection.  I don't advise that you try to master this too soon because this work really needs to be done on the whole sentence level which is not where we start, but just to give you a preview of what is to come, here's what you'll need to know about Mora theory.  Basically, this linguistics theory states that the "heaviest" syllable in an Arabic word carries the stress or accent.  For example, in the word "computer" in English, the middle syllable "pu" is stressed.  In English one kind of has to learn where the stress in a word is by rote memorization of ever word.  The stressed syllable does not always have the greatest number of sounds nor does it occur in a consistent place within a word.  In Arabic though, stress in a word falls on the part of the word that has the biggest pill of sounds and this is usually a part of the word that has the lengthened vowel because you are adding the long vowel to the short vowel (which counts as two sounds, not as one).  Mora theory states that the heaviest syllable, i.e. the syllable with more letters and sounds than other syllables in the word, carries the stress in Arabic.  Knowing this will help you identify the long vowels "elif," "ye," and "w@w" in words where the other rules above don't already tell you.  I hope to write more about this topic soon, but in the mean time, if you'd like to learn about heavy and light syllables check out the following links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_(linguistics)

www.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/syll.pdf

(FINALLY) It is important to note that the 1st chapter in Sound & Script uses a lot of lone words in Arabic from English which has an upside and a downside.  The upside is that it helps the English speaker read using some Arabic letters while recognizing familiar sounding words.  The downsides are that the way these lone words are spelled in Arabic is debatable (is Utah spelled with a light or dark letter "t" in Arabic since there are two letter "t"s in Arabic?).  The text book seems to avoid using dark/emphatic consonants to transliterate English words into Arabic, but this is problematic because consonant sounds effect the sounds of neighboring vowels.  It is not possible to say the "ah" sound in Utah in Arabic without a dark/emphatic "T".  The other downside of working on lots of lone words (especially proper nouns) is that if there are any exceptions to the rules in how Arabic is pronounced those exceptions will be present in the loan words from English because Arabic speakers are trying to pronounce the loan words more like the original in English rather than in a natural sounding way in Arabic.  "Mama" in Arabic is a very strange sounding word because that kind of "a" sound is not usually present with an "m" sound.  The original Arabic word for mother is pronounced 'Um (glottal stop + "U" as in book + "m").

TOP PRIORITY

     Personally, it seems the most important thing to focus on in the beginning of one's study of Arabic is the correct pronunciation of the vowels (focusing first on distinguishing their range of sounds, as in "e" vs. "ae", and then a little bit, but not too much, on their duration, as in "i" vs. "ii").  The vowels will tell you almost everything you need to know about the consonants they are connected to in terms of whether they are light/non-emphatic or dark/emphatic, and later they will dictate a great deal of the grammar rules you will learn.

     After that, memorize the alphabet as soon as possible paying close attention to which 18 consonants are light/non-emphatic ones and which 10 consonants are dark/emphatic ones.  All the letters of the alphabet are covered extensively in the google docs link for the vowel chart I gave you above.  Just keep reading past the chart for the vowels to get to the analysis of and memorization help for all of the consonants.