Travel reports by westernes tend to provide a fascinating, though rather limited, insight into Arabic dialects from back when. Think Burckhardt or Wallin.
I admit I am not familiar with Charles Doughty, so many many thanks for bringing him to my attention :o) Any more on language in his Travels?
Yes, there's quite a bit of Arabic mixed in with the archaic English, and the glossary at the back gives the original Arabic spelling of most of it.
Posted by language hat at August 18, 2006 06:51 PMThanks, hat :o)
Oy gewalt, my next package from Amazon will be heavy...
Lagniappe — what a delightful word.
“Stean” is of that class of zombie English words that you come across when you're the habit of looking up common German words in the DEW and cross-referencing to the OED; see also “gaffel” meaning “fork” (the Grimms say it could mean especially “dung fork” but the OED doesn’t mention that in particular), “to space” meaning “to pace” and others.
Posted by Aidan Kehoe at August 19, 2006 04:47 AMyou're the
Some day I hope to be more than just a pattern of behaviour!
Posted by Aidan Kehoe at August 19, 2006 05:17 AMThanks for this! I'll have to recount it to my father-in-law - he is fond of using the same example (the Egyptian "g" sound) when he explains differences in regional Arabic...and I must say, I am looking over at our carved Druse chest with different eyes all of a sudden!
Posted by beth at August 22, 2006 09:48 AMOther Arabs have always loved to make fun of the Egyptian hard "g", but of course the "gimel" is hard in most other Semitic languages, and some specialists seem to think it may have been in early Arabic as well. (If some of those specialists are Egyptians, well...)
A very old, stale joke among American and doubtless other Arabists is to pronounce Egypt as "Ee-Gypt" with a hard G, to note the hard G of Egyptian Arabic. Strictly speaking, you do start to hear the "j" as you go up the Nile, and in Upper Egypt it was apparently common 50 years ago or so, the hard g being mostly Cairo, the Delta, and Alexandria. Today the hard g has spread up the Nile because of radio and TV, which always use Cairo hard-g pronunciation even for Classical Arabic. I heard the "j" in Luxor and Aswan as recently as the 1970s, and it may still be heard today for all I know, though I think the hard "g" has taken over.
Michael Dunn