Advanced - إنفلونزا الخنازير

The Arabic word for "swine flu" raises some interesting questions. One of these questions concerns the frequency of epenthesis in Arabic.

Epenthesis is the insertion of a vowel or a consonant into a word to make its pronunciation easier. Consider, for instance, the modern English word "knife". This comes from Old English "cnif" and is related to Old Norse "knifr" and Middle Low German "knif". All these words are related to the French noun "canif", which means "penknife". If we compare Engl. "knife" and Fr. "canif", we see that the French have inserted an epenthetic vowel ("a") in order to make the word easier to pronounce. The English don't need this vowel because they pronounce "kn" like "n".

"Pnom Pen" might also be cited in this connection. The French pronounce "Pnom" as a monosyllable, but BBC news readers invariably insert an epenthetic vowel between "p" and n".

Now what has all this got to do with Arabic? It seems to me that epenthesis is a widespread phenomenon in Arabic, but I'm not sure whether it's obligatory, accidental or subject to regional variations.

Let's examine a few examples. If we glance through the PDF transcript we discover that the Arabic word for "influenza" looks very like its English equivalent, but Ehab and Mohamed have inserted an extra vowel between "f" and "l". This extra vowel is clearly audible in the recording, though there is at least one sentence where it almost disappears. Was this intentional or unintentional?

So much for "infeluenza al-khanaziir". We can now scrutinise a second example. One of the Arabic words for "money" is "fuloos". If we consult the Arabicpod dictionary and click on the button we discover that it is pronounced as a disyllabic word. However, when I visited Tunisia many years ago I often heard this word pronounced "floos" with no epenthetic vowel between "f" and "l". The French borrowed the Arabic word during the colonial era (examples can be found in the novels of Jean-Paul Sartre), and the French word, which is spelt "flouse" or "flouze", is always pronounced as a monosyllable.

Now let's consider the Arabic word for "film". If we consult the Arabicpod dictionary we discover an epenthetic vowel between "l" and "m" in the transcription, but if we click on the button we hear a monosyllabic word which sounds almost like its English equivalent. The mystery deepens if we listen to the lesson about a "wicked" film. In the recording we can identify two phonetic variants.

A similar problem arises when we examine the lesson about connections. "Waasta" is initially pronounced as two syllables, then Mohamed inserts an epenthetic vowel which transforms "waasta" to "waas-i-ta". Lucy immediately notices this and repeats "waas-t-ta."

There are probably hundreds of Arabic words which are pronounced with epenthhetic vowels, and I suspect that in some cases the epenthetic vowel has become an integral part of the word. Is "shirikaat" (= enterprises) a case in point?

Many thanks Desmond for this very interesting topic,

The examples that you highlighted of insertion vowels within a word to ease its pronunciation are either colloquial or borrowed words. Classical Arabic is more robust and does not have this difference in pronunciation within one word. People in the street tend to use epenthetic vowels in many cases just to make the flow of the speech easier. For instance, the words you gave as examples, like (floos) or (fuloos) are used in the street in both forms. Other words like (influenza) and (film) are used mostly with epenthetic vowels in the street (infiluanza and filim), however, the word (film) is pronounced in Modern Standard Arabic (i.e in reading the news) as (film) without a second vowel after the L.
To answer your question at the end, the word (شركات) is pronounced as (Sharikaat), however, you might hear in the street as (shirkaat), but the proper way of saying it is still (Sharikaat).
Hope that clarifies that colloquial Arabic has differences which are based on how people are used to say the words rather than how words should be pronounced properly.

Dear Ehab,

Many thanks for your prompt and very informative reply. I hope you're not overworking.

Best wishes
Desmond

Hi Desmond

Thank you for your topic too. I found it interesting, especially the historical parts.

I've noticed epenthetic vowels are used a lot in Syria/Lebanon in simple nouns. For example بنت formally is "bint" or "binton" and colloquially in the Gulf they say "bint" whereas Lebanese say "benit". I believe there's a rule in Arabic that two sukons cannot be next to each other and so, technically, "bint" is incorrect بِنْتْ and بِنِتْ is incorrect because there's an extra vowel added. It is only بِنْتٌ that does not violate any rules.

But even formal Arabic adds epenthetic vowels. عطش the noun, "thirst" is pronounced عَطَش while all simple nouns like this usually have a sukon on the second letter.

Consonants also get changed to aid with pronounciation as you'd know. Like the sun letters but also, in the case where a ب ba' arrives after a ن noon and the ba' has a sukon. eg. جنبيا is pronounced "jambiyya"

Dear jookieapc,

I'm glad you found my comments interesting. Judging by the quality of your English and the depth of your knowledge, you're a native speaker of English and a professional linguist with a special interest in Arabic.

I only started learning Arabic a few months ago, so my knowledge of the language is still very rudimentary. ana mazilt mubtade fil arabia! However, I have an excellent memory and am learning fast although I only devote an hour a day to Arabic.

Your examples are very interesting. Where did you find that rule about two adjacent sukons? I can't find the rule anywhere on the Net, and there's no article on sukons in the English version of Wikipedia. As the saying goes, "quod non est in interrete non est in mundo"!

In December I listened to interviews with Palestinians who were trapped in the Gaza Strip. The word "bint" cropped up quite often in the interviews and was always pronounced as a monosyllable. The vowel sounded like the "i" in Engl. "it".

It's not really surprising that the Arabic word for "dagger" is pronounced "jambiyya". Nor is it surprising that it is transcribed both as "jambiyya" and "janbiyya". This is a kind of assimilation that can frequently be observed in modern English, where the word combination "ten bikes" is often pronounced "tembikes". I think I once read something about similar phenomena in ancient Greek.

Epenthesis is no doubt a universal phenomenon, but it seems to be more common in some languages than in others. While it's very common in Arabic and English, it's comparatively rare in German and French. The French have no difficulty in pronouncing the awkward consonantal clusters in "Pnom Pen", "pneu" or "pneumonie", and native speakers of German have no trouble with "Knecht", "kneifen" or "Kneipe".

In many cases the changes brought about by epenthesis are permanent. Early Latin forms like "poclum" were rapidly replaced by "poculum" and the like. The epenthetic "t" in Ger. "hoffentlich" is so old that very few native speakers are aware of the epenthetic character of the consonant in question.

There are, however, a few cases where the changes wrought by epenthesis are quite recent. In nineteenth-century German infinitives like "sehn" were quite common. The famous German linguist, Jost Trier, whom I knew personally, always said and even wrote "sehn", but nobody speaks like that nowadays. "Sehn" has been definitively supplanted by "sehen", which contains an epenthetic vowel.

This is a brief postscript on the circle-shaped diacritic known as a "sucon" or "sukun". If the anglicized term "sucon" is used as a search word it is virtually impossible to find information about this diacritic on the Net. The orthographic variant "sukun" yields better results. The sukun is mentioned only briefly by Ambros in his "Einführung in die arabische Schriftsprache" (Munich, 1975), p. 44, but some extremely useful information is provided in the German, French, Italian and English versions of Wikipedia. The English version contains quite a good article entitled "Arabic diacritics". There is a similar article in the French version ("Diacritiques de la langue arabe"), and the German and Italian versions have separate articles devoted exclusively to the sukun. In the present instance I would recommend the French version, where the subsection devoted to the sukun is particularly long and detailed. It is a pleasure to read.

how to say'keep this' in arabic

If you mean (keep this) as in saying (keep the pen with you) then in classical Arabic it is (دعه معك da3hu ma3ak) and in colloquial you can use (خلّيه معك khalleeh ma3ak).