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RECOMMENDATION FOR OFFERING A NEW LINGUISTICS COURSE: “STRUCTURE OF ARABIC”

Volume 1

Zina Saadi Northeastern University

319 Huntington Ave. Apt 09 Boston, MA 02115

zisaadi@ccs.neu.edu (857) 919-1250

ENG-U 301-16

Dr. Howe, William

April 20, 2004

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RECOMMENDATION FOR OFFERING A NEW LINGUISTICS COURSE:

“STRUCTURE OF ARABIC”

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Executive Summary

With the increasing demand for fluent Arabic speakers in various fields, it is important to

study the direction for this demand and whether it is aiming for a technical or literal

fluency. Nowadays with the current war on terrorism, high-tech companies are in need of

technically fluent people in Arabic linguistics who are not necessarily speakers of the

language but rather knowledgeable of the linguistics of the language. Due to the available

split between the fluency of a language and mastering its linguistics rules, sometimes

native Arabic speakers are not aware of their language’s linguistics rules and thus cannot

help as much as someone who knows the linguistics of the language. This paper is

intended to recommend offering a linguistics course of the Arabic language “Structure of

Arabic to the Linguistics Program at Northeastern University. This paper will also study

the need of such a course particularly the need of each linguistics component of Arabic

while presenting an overview of the course’s content.

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Contents

1. Introduction

2. Introducing new course to Northeastern University

3. Course guidelines

3.1 Teaching strategy

3.2 Course textbook

3.3 Course content overview

4. Course content implementation

4.1 History of the Arabic language 4.2 Semitic languages vs. Arabic 4.3 Standard language vs. dialects. 4.4 Arabic writing system.

4.5 Standard Arabic linguistics.

1. Phonetics and phonology

2. Morphology

3. Syntax

5. Conclusion

Appendix-A

Appendix-B

Appendix-C

Appendix-D

Appendix-E

Appendix-F

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1. Introduction. Language has been the most important tool of communication since a

very long time. Ancient people engraved their use of language in temples, graves and

caves, which gives us nowadays information about their culture, living style and

creativity. The linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky characterized it as “a mirror of

the mind in a deep and significant sense” and “a product of human intelligence”

(Chomsky 1975). Studying different languages would give us a taste of the diverse

human intelligence. Therefore, in order to understand or teach certain people’s creativity

and intelligence, it is quite important to learn their languages and understand its structure.

“If you can't un-reveal the multi-layered Arabic of Mahmud Darwish, the foremost

Palestinian poet, you have no business standing in front of a classroom and teaching his

oeuvre” (Kramer 2002). Unrevealing the multi-layers of Arabic is far beyond unrevealing

the meaning. Indeed, Arabic’s poetry is one of the most complex aspects of its literature,

and in order to understand it, someone needs to understand the linguistics theories (from

morphology to syntax) that bind the language.

Since the Gulf War, interest in learning the Arabic language has been given

importance in the United States. As a result, the department of defense took a high jump

in Arabic enrollment as it sent out requests for more Arabic linguists (Howe 2002).

Nowadays, especially after September 11’s tragedy, the United States had added new

funding for federal support of Middle East centers and programs in the universities by

20.5 million dollars (Kramer 2002), which increased enrollments and the demand for

more courses and teachers. Interest in learning foreign languages at Louisiana State

University had increased by 18 percent throughout the last 6 years with a 93 percent

increase for the interest in the Arabic language. For instance, two students at Louisiana

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State University stated that they were looking to learn a new language rather than Latin

descendent languages, so they found Arabic to be interesting and different (Mitchell

2004).

Dr. Catharine Keatley, Dr. Richard Robin, and Dr. Karin Ryding who are

professors of linguistics mentioned that “Language teaching in the United States is based

on the idea that the goal of language acquisition is communicative competence: the

ability to use the language correctly and appropriately to accomplish communication

goals.” They also summarized the areas of this communicative competence as four

competence: linguistic, socio-linguistic, discourse, and strategic (Keatley et al. 2003).

Since Linguistics take over half of the goal requirement of fulfilling a communicative

competence in learning a new language, then it should be given importance, and if

necessarily it should be taught in a separate course especially if the language is

structurally different from the English language in either a difference in the scriptural

form such as Chinese, Hebrew or Arabic, or a difference in phonological, morphological

or syntactical aspects such as Fulani, Swahili, or Turkish. Therefore, it is important to

give the students a good base of the linguistics of a new language as the first important

step leading to learning a new language to strengthen their knowledge in the structure of

the new language that will make them self confident in such a challenging area of

communicative competence.

With the current war on terrorism, high-tech companies are in need of Native

Arabic speakers as well as linguist to work together in various fields. Thus it will be

really important if the linguist working with the native Arabic speaker is aware of the

Arabic linguistics in order to ease the process of integrating their input into their field of

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work. For instance, in a speech recognition company that would like to develop a phone

device that recognizes and intelligently understands the Arabic commands does not

necessarily need to hire native Arabic speakers as the main application developer

integrator, but could consult him for references, however, it should hire someone with a

strong phonetical and phonological knowledge of the Arabic language rules. Sometimes

native Arabic speakers are not aware of their language’s linguistics rules and thus cannot

help extracting the Arabic phonemes from a stream of sound waves as much as someone

who knows the linguistics of the language.

2. Introducing New Course to Northeastern University. Northeastern University has

been offering Arabic classes for the last two years. However, these classes only teach the

language and few linguistics properties, but it does not enable the students to recognize

an Arabic phoneme within a stream of phonemes in a spectrogram. Therefore,

Northeastern University with the support of the linguistics program should plan to offer a

technical course that would focus on the linguistics of the classical Arabic language. The

course should be conducted in English and would be open to anyone interested, whether a

native speaker of Arabic, a linguistics student, or someone who wants to join a high-tech

company that is in need of and Arabic linguist who is not necessarily a native speaker of

the language. The course will have a prerequisite of either prior basic linguistics

knowledge or of completing the introductory course of linguistics. In addition, it will be

an upper-level course because of its advanced linguistics analyses presentation. The

course will not produce students fluent in reading or writing the language but rather

Arabic linguistics professional who will be able to recognize the Arabic’s phonology and

extract it from a given spectrogram, and who will also be able to determine a meaning of

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a certain derived word in Arabic by extracting its root from the non-linear language

morphemes without having to memorize much vocabulary.

3. Course Guideline. The course guideline consists of a suggested teaching strategy, a

suggested textbook, and an overview of the topic of this course, along with a course

description1 that should be written in the student courses catalog.

3.1 Teaching Strategy. Keatley et al. suggested a newer strategy for teaching a

foreign language in general. This new methodology consists of changing the notion of

“teacher-centered” that focuses more on the teacher as the main controller of the

student’s progress or achievement throughout the course into the idea of “learner-

centered” that emphasizes more on the student as the core focus. The “learner-centered”

notion enable students to interact with each other in solving the in class problems in

groups and suggesting answers to each others, provide some presentations to the class,

rate and propose a grade and comments on each other’s presentations in addition to the

professor’s evaluation, choose the topic they wish to present or write a research paper on.

While the old notion of teaching provided as “teacher-centered”, supported the ideas that

the professor would talk while the student listen, the professor would choose the topics,

students would work individually and the professor would answer the students question

and evaluate their learning (Keatley et al. 2003).

Professor Heather Littlefield who has been teaching linguistics courses at

Northeastern University suggested that the course’s theme should be consisting of a

combination of both notions: “teacher-centered” and “learner-centered” (Littlefield

2004). She claimed that by integrating both notions, students will have an opportunity to

interact with each other when it comes to in-class group work while solving linguistics 1 See Appendix-A for more information in a suggested course syllable

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problems of the Arabic language (learner centered), as well as applying the theories that

the teacher presents (teacher-centered).

3.2 Course Textbook. Due to the limitation of an existing Arabic linguistics

textbook that provides exercises at the end of each section or chapter, the course should

be based on one main book that illustrates all the linguistics aspects of the classical

Arabic and a supplementary book for additional readings. A suggestive main book for the

course could be: A grammar of classical Arabic by Fischer, Wolf Dietrich. In addition to

the main book, the course material should include a set of selective articles that includes

the linguistics aspects of Arabic dialects, especially since the course will consider the

linguistics of the classical Arabic. By reading the selective articles of various Arabic

dialects, the students will have an opportunity to explore the various dialects of Arabic

and learn about their similarities and differences. The course may either be based on

exams for grading purposes or research papers and presentations, or a mix of both.

Depending on the capabilities of the instructor and whether the instructor speaks the

Arabic language fluently to the point that he could derive his own exercise and exams, or

if he cannot then, then research papers would be recommended.

3.3 Course content overview. This course is an introductory to the linguistics of

the Arabic language. The course’ s title should be: “Structure of Arabic” (Littlefield

2004). In addition, the course’s design should enable the students to apply the linguistics

theory to Arabic in a way of presenting and explaining the theories first then offering

some problems to students for applying the theories in order to strengthen their

understanding.

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The course should be broken in four main sections. It will also include a brief

introductory to Semitic languages, a brief history of the evolvement of the Arabic

language, and the language writing system. The main four sections should be ordered by

phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax. As the entire course will be tough in

English, the examples illustrating the theories of linguistics that would be drawn from

Arabic would be transcribed using the international phonetics alphabet (IPA).

4.Course content implementation. The course should focus on the important linguistics

areas of phonetics & phonology, morphology, and syntax, as well as an introduction to

the background of the Arabic language and its distinct features. Semantics will be omitted

because students will not be required to speak the language. Therefore it will be hard to

teach the metaphorical meanings behind some syntactic structures if the students do not

have a strong ability in reading, understanding and speaking the language.

4.1 History of the Arabic language. Considering the spreading of the Arabic

language, the earliest evidence of the linguistic form that was identified as Arabic was

found on a tombstone in the Syrian Desert dated A.D. 328, in addition to few inscriptions

from the fifth and sixth century (Beeston 1970: 13). Other old evidence of the use of the

Arabic language were found in the oral preservation and transmission of the poetic form

of the language through generations from the pre-Islamic Arab tribes who lived in the

Arabian peninsula2 and neighboring regions in the eighth century A.D. During the pre-

Islamic period, the Arabic language was the connecting bond among different tribes.

According to the belief of Muslims, God sent the Koran in Arabic to the Prophet

Muhammad through the Angel Gabriel over a period of twenty-three years, 610-632 A.D.

The Holy Koran, as Muslims believe to be the words of God, is characterized by its deep 2 Currently known as Saudi Arabia.

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poetic structure, which at that time was the elite method of using the language. The

Koran was preserved through memorizations and was not written until several years

following the Prophet’s death, and was compelled by the third Caliph during the seventh

century A.D.

Islam had spread rapidly from the Arabic by migration of southern Arabian tribes

to Africa, Asia and Europe. According to Janet Watson, within 100 years Islam had

spread north into the Levant3, east into Iraq and khyrassan4, and west into north Africa,

without forgetting Spain, India, Indonesia and cross central Asia to china (Watson 2002).

According to Watson, Islam expansion was not a cultural/religious conquest but rather a

linguistic conquest since the expansion of the use of the language spread over the Jews

and Christian who were living within the Islamic state. For instance, by the tenth

century, Copts living in northern Egypt no longer continued to use Greek or Coptic, and

rather they used Arabic (Watson 2002). While in northern Africa, Berber had shown a

resistance to survival and resisted the spread of Arabic in many rural places in Algeria,

Morocco and Libya. Although Berber resisted against the Arabic language conquest, at a

certain extent it borrowed some Arabic words to be added to its dictionary. An example

of an Arabic word borrowed to the use of Berber language is alghoroom ‘a loaf of bread’

in addition to the words used in the religion that refer to the religious rituals and belief

such as rabbi ‘my lord’ or jamee ‘mosque’.

The elite language of the holy Koran had become nowadays the standard Arabic

language (also referred to as the formal language). However, after the invasion of the

Arab world by European countries, the Arabic language had been influenced by the

3 The region located at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea (Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Palestine, and Egypt). 4 A city/village currently found in Afghanistan.

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language of the invaders, and thus witnessed a new formation of dialects throughout the

Arab world. For instance, the Algerian dialect borrowed the word of dolma ‘stuffed

vegetables’ from Turkish though the Ottoman Empire, sebbat ‘shoes’ from Spanish, and

frijider ‘fridge’ from French. However, almost more than fifty percent of the Algerian

dialect vocabulary is based on French. Thus, it is important to view and study the history

of each dialect and point out the affiliations of each dialect as the golden key that can be

used in the computational linguistics field and especially in voice recognition. While

implementing software that recognizes a specific dialect, it would be more efficient to

make to software associated to the languages that the dialect affiliates with just in case

the speaker uses words, phrases, or sentences of the affiliated languages in addition to the

dialect.

4.2 Semitic Languages vs. Arabic. The Arabic language is nowadays spoken by

about 300 million people as a native language5 and about over 1 billion people who use

Arabic as a religious language (Al-Bataal 2002). The Arabic language belongs to the

Semitic languages ‘ family, which itself belongs to a wider Afro-Asiatic division of

genetically related families of languages that includes ancient Egyptian, Coptic, and

Berber languages. The principal members within the Semitic languages’ family are:

Ugaritic and Accadian (now considered dead languages), Aramaic (few of its linguistics’

forms are available within the current surviving Semitic languages), the Canaanite

languages such as Hebrew, ancient and modern south Arabian, and the Semitic languages

of Ethiopia (Beeston 1970: 12).

5 Arab world, see Figure 1, Appendix-D

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Some of the few important linguistics rules to note about the Semitic languages

can be found in the areas of phonology, morphology and syntax. First, the phonological

characteristics of the Semitic languages consist of:

(1) A rich consonantal system and a limited vocal system (vowels) that are

only presented by the short and long form of each of the sounds found in

/ /, /i/, and /u/ (Watson 2002: 1).

(2) A rich inventory of consonants that are formed from the throat, which

includes both uvular fricatives / /, and / /, both the laryngeals /§/ and /s/,

and the pharyngeal /c/ (Watson 2002: 1).

(3) Voiced, voiceless, and emphatic consonantal phonemes that are glotalized

in the modern south Arabian and Ethiopian Semitic languages, and

pharyngelized in the central Semitic languages of Arabic (Faber 1997: 8).

Within the lateral set of Semitic phonemes, it is important to note the voiceless lateral /|/

that is the same as the simple lateral /l/ in the current Semitic languages and the emphatic

lateral /|/ that is the ancestor of the Arabic phoneme found known as dYd (ض). The

emphatic lateral /|/ is found in some Arabic dialects such as the one spoken in southern

Yemen (Watson 2002: 2).

Second, one of the most distinguishing characteristics of morphology that is found

in Semitic languages’ family is the root-pattern morphology system (Watson 2002). “The

root is a semantic abstraction consisting of two, three. Or (less commonly) four

consonants from which words are derived through the superimposition of templates

patterns” (Holes 1995: 81). An example of such root-pattern morphology could be seen in

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Arabic in the following root consonants /d-r-s/ which means ‘to learn’, by adding the

following bound morphemes /ma-a-a/, the word / / meaning ‘school’ is obtained.

Nouns have feminine and masculine gender, as well as singular and plural form

with an existence of dual form in some Semitic languages. For instance in Arabic, the

word sayyara meaning ‘a car’ holds a feminine gender connotation, while the word baab

meaning ‘a door’ holds a masculine gender connotation. In addition, adjectives are

similar to nouns in the morphological form: predicative adjectives agree with the noun

subject in gender and number, whereas attributive adjectives agree with the attributed

noun in gender, number, case, and definitiveness (Watson 2002: 3). Semitic languages

have three pronominal forms found in the independent subject pronoun (free morpheme),

and bound possessive and object pronouns that are suffixed to nouns and verbs. The

verbal form has two conjugations for the subject found in use of suffixes in the case of a

past tense, and the use of prefixes and suffixes in the tenses rather than the past tense

(present or future) (Watson 2002: 4).

According to Holes, There are some distinctive sets of morphological processes

that distinguished the Semitic language:

(1) A set of final short vowel suffixes that are attached to the noun to indicate

case.

(2) A set of short vowels suffixed to the verb-indicating mood.

(3) A final nasal consonant ending of /-n/ suffixed to the noun to indicate

indefinitiveness6.

Considering few illustrative examples to the previous phonological characteristics

sets in Classical Arabic, for instance, the suffix /-u/ is a nominative case marker when 6 This process is called “Tanwin” in the Arabic language

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added to the word alwalad meaning ‘the boy’ gives us the nominative form of alwaladu

which makes is the subject. Lastly, regarding the final nasal consonant ending, if we take

the word waladun meaning ‘a boy’ in the nominative case note that the prefix /al-/

indicating definitiveness is removed and the suffix /-n/ is added to indicate

indefinitiveness.

Lastly, by exploring the area of syntax in Semitic languages we notice that the

original word order was VSO (Verb-Subject-Object). However in current Modern

Hebrew and Arabic, such order has been changing to SVO (Watson 2002: 4). For

instance, in modern Arabic both forms of VSO and SVO are accepted, and can be

illustrated by the following examples:

(1) VSO: sharab-a Omar al-asir ‘drink-past Omar the-juice’

(2) SVO: Omar ya-shrob-u al-asir ‘Omar present-drink-present the-juice’

It is really important to mention the morphology, phonology and syntax

characteristics of Semitic languages for many important reasons. Most importantly, by

learning how the structure of the Arabic language emerges from the Semitic languages

family and by observing its examples, one can use the earned linguistics to use for the

other Semitic languages such as Hebrew or Modern Ethiopian in different areas including

computer programming, studying other Semitic languages, field works.

For instance, in the field of computer programming for the information retrieval

filed that consists of enabling the computer to understand a given text, by knowing the

similarities that holds the Semitic languages together, someone can make a program

written to retrieve information in Arabic, reusable to retrieve information in Hebrew by

knowing the word order that is common in both languages. Thus the programmer could

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design an interface for Semitic languages’ syntax, then implement the interface for

Arabic an Hebrew since they both have a the same word-order sentence structure, then

implement a separate dictionary for each languages. This design comparable to designing

and implementing the interface for each language separately, will be better in the matter

of its usability, running speed, and memory usage.

4.3 Standard Language vs. dialects. There exist several regional dialects of

Arabic that differs in many linguistic aspects from the west to the east of the Arabic

world. Thus speakers of Moroccan dialect for instance would not understand speakers of

Iraqi dialect if both groups spoke using their dialects, but if they use the standard Arabic,

which is the formal language of instruction throughout the Arab world, then they will

have no problem understanding each others. These dialects show differences in

vocabulary, pronunciation, intonation and grammar. For instance, the word equivalent for

‘a man’ is zalame in the Jordanian dialect, rajel in the Algerian dialect, rejjaal in the

Palestinian dialect, while rajol in the standard Arabic. By observing such examples, we

notice not only a difference at the phonological level (rejjaal vs. rajel) but also at the

lexicon level (zalame vs. rejjaal). Such differences makes it hard for companies in voice

recognition field to build an artificially intelligence software that could detect the

meaning of Arabic words used by different dialect without detecting which dialect to

account for. For example, if the software detects the word rejjaal while thinking that the

speaker is speaking standard Arabic, then a failure will result to the crash of the program

due to the none-existence of such a word in standard Arabic.

Therefore it is important while teaching the course to let students do projects on a

dialect they choose to enable them to have another view of the linguistic duality of

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Arabic. This linguistic duality is usually referred to as the diglossia of a language. Unlike

in the United States, people born communicating in English, end up using English in

schools, at work, or anywhere within the country, in the Arab world people are born

speaking the dialect of the region they live within, then learn the standard Arabic in

schools or mosques to enable them understand the holy Koran or communicate within the

circle of educational and industrial areas. Thus there are no native speakers of Modern

Standard Arabic, but rather native speakers of a certain dialect in Arabic and a user of the

modern Arabic language that are mostly taught in schools (Al-Bataal 2002). Furthermore,

diglossia among the Arab world exist in the form of a high elite language presented by

the language of the holy Koran (standard Arabic) and a low language presented by the

local dialect that brings a social group of people together. This is useful to know because

in the area of voice recognition for instance, someone could implement a formal Arabic

recognition software and use it along with each dialect to filter the standard Arabic

words, then use the affiliated languages to each dialect to filter the foreign languages or

dialects’ words, then use the dialect dictionary to get the meaning of the spoken phrases.

4.4 Arabic writing system. The scripts of the Arabic language along with the

scripts of the Latin alphabet are both historically traceable to a script that was used by the

Old Phoenician language around 1000 B.C, which consisted of twenty-two symbols (all

consonants). In the eight century, Old Aramaic used the same twenty-two symbols, but

assigned some vowel values to some few consonants within the borrowed script. A

century later, Greeks borrowed this script but abandoned the consonantal value of the

vowel letters, which became the ancestor of the European scripts. On the other hand, the

old Phoenician scripts were introduced to south Arabia during the same period, which

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then was expanded to twenty-nine distinctive symbols to cope with the Arabian repertory

system (Beeston 1970).

As the Arabic language is written from right to left, it is also readable in the same

direction. The Arabic alphabet system consists of 28 letters (equivalent to 28 symbols

with the addition to one symbol), three of which are long vowels. Short vowels in Arabic

are symbolized by adding symbols either below or above the written consonant:

(1) The symbol of a short line added above an aspirated consonant adds

the sound of [ ] to it.

(2) The symbol of a short line added bellow an aspirated consonant adds

the sound of [i] to it.

(3) The symbol of a small circle attached to the left of a short line, added

above the consonant, adds the sound of [u] to it.

Along with these symbols there are also some few other important symbols added to the

consonants to denote other phonemic characterization. An example of such symbols is

the common small circle added above a certain consonant makes the consonant un-

aspirated. However these symbols are rarely found in common books, newspapers or

articles using the standard Arabic. These symbols are found, along with others in the holy

Koran, literature and poetry books or volumes, or in the case if the word were an

uncommon word, then the writer would use the symbols to denote the correct

pronunciation. However, in the field of information retrieval, this lack of short vowels

symbolization makes it hard for the program to run effectively. For instance, the word

kataba meaning ‘wrote’ could be confused with kotiba ‘have been written’ in case the

short vowels symbols are not present. However using Arabic syntax could solve such

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problem, which in this case say that a transitive verb in the active form requires a subject,

while in the passive form, the subject is omitted. Therefore by knowing such feature of

Arabic syntax, linguists can make programs more intelligent.

In general, the study of the characteristics of the Arabic scripture is important

because especially in the field of computational linguistics and particularly the field of

information retrieval. As part of information retrieval, the programmer is supposed to

develop a program that extracts a word from a certain text and then extracts from it its

root by using some morphological elimination of the applied affixes. However the

program should be aware of the Arabic letters as well as its changes as it occurs in the

beginning, the middle or the end of the word. This accounting for such changes require

the program developer a certain linguistics knowledge of the Arabic scripts as well as its

symbolic additions.

4.5 Standard Arabic linguistics. This section will offer an overview of the

important linguistics area that the course should cover regarding Arabic linguistics.

1. Phonetics and phonology. Considering Arabic’s phonetic, it is important

to study the Arabic phonemic system that consists of consonants and vowels (short

vowels, long vowels, and diphthongs). Regarding teaching Arabic’s consonants, students

should learn how to pronounce the Arabic consonants according to the manner of

articulating the sound as well as its place of articulation. For instance, as the sound /b/ is

pronounced in English, which is a sound of an Arabic consonant as well, with the closure

of the upper lip with the lower lip (bilabial place of articulation) and a closure (manner

of articulation), it is important to note how other sounds in Arabic are produced upon its

place of production within the vocal system as well as the manner that should accompany

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it. For more illustrative presentation of the pronunciation of the Arabic alphabet as well

as the mapping between the alphabets of the language and the International Phonetics

Alphabet (IPA)7. It should be noted that not all sounds in the Arabic language are found

in the IPA. This is due to the existence of some allophones of the same phoneme that is

present in IPA.

Regarding the vowel system in Arabic, it is important to discuss its three section:

(1) Short vowels: noted by three symbols (above or bellow the letter)8.

(2) Long vowel: demonstrated by the letters { } as /i/, /u/, /a/.

(3) Diphthong: there are two diphthongs in Arabic found as /ay/ in the

alphabet and as /aw/ in the alphabet .

It should be noted that in case (2), the three long vowels demonstrated also

include the vowels close in pronunciation to each of /i/, /u/ or /a/ and which include the

set {/o/, /e/, /y/}. For example the word /korras/ ‘notebook’ in Arabic could be also

pronounced as /kurras/ or /korraes/. This is because the long vowel system distinguishes

the major differentiations between vowels but omits the minor differences9.

However the course should also focus on other phonological features

rather than studying the allophones and phonemes of Arabic. The suggested features

should cover syllabification as well as word stress patterns. This is important because

these two features are considered two important keys into diagnosing a spectrogram. In a

spectrogram, many phonological features are used to extract the specific phonemic

representation of the flow of sounds. These phonological features include the manner of

7 See Figures 3 and 4 in appendix-D for more illustrations. 8 Prior noted in section 4.5 9 Could be thought of it as the major three colors to be red, blue and green and all of its differentiations to be attributed to the major color falling within its range.

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articulation, syllabification and word stress. Therefore it is important for the course to

cover these features due to its usage in the technical computational linguistics field.

2. Morphology. Arabic morphology covers the wider and most complicated

part of Arabic linguistics. While in English words belonging to similar classes share a

specific morphological pattern found in either the process of affixation or pre-fixation,

in Arabic, the morphological patterns are the tool illustrating the words classes. For

instance the words muhandis ’engineer’, muallim ‘teacher’, muhami ‘lawyer’, muddaris

‘tutor’, munaqish ‘someone who argues’, and muhallil ‘analyzer’ all share the

phonological pattern m-u-a-I which is the morphological pattern that is used to create

words illustrating professions or jobs from a main word root. Teaching the root and

morphological patterns is very important in Arabic morphology. For example, if a

person would want to look a specific word in Arabic such as maktaba ‘library’ in an

Arabic dictionary, the person will have difficulties finding the word. This is because in

Arabic the word is not listed as it is written but rather underneath its root listing which

is in this case k-t-b ‘to write’. Therefore students taking the “Structure of Arabic”

course need to learn the processes behind extracting the root of a word for purposes

such as locating a derivation of the root in the dictionary as well as derivation words

from specific words. The derivation of words in Arabic based on roots and the

application of morphological processes is a very important tool into Arabic semantic.

For instance, knowing that by adding the root into morphological patterns m-a-a-a we

obtain madrassa ‘school’, -a-e- we obtain daress ‘learner’, -a- we obtain darss

‘lecture’, it would be easier for students to note these patterns as well as its contribution

to the meaning. Therefore such morphological patterns could make the process of

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learning the Arabic vocabulary (if the student intend to learn the Arabic language for

instance) easier by just learning the basic roots of the words and learning the

morphological patterns associated with the roots along with its semantic contribution in

order to be able to either understand a new word associated with a known root, or to

extract a root from a word.

In addition to mentioning the morphological patterns associated with words

derivations, it is also important to mention other morphological patterns associated with

words specifically nouns, verbs, adjectives, or prepositions. This field in morphology is

denoted by morpho-syntax because morphemes in this case contribute to the syntax in the

first place then to the semantic of the sentence. Therefore this section would be

introduced while studying Arabic morphology. However, it would be important to revisit

this section while presenting Arabic syntax because it is Important to learn how words are

ordered in an Arabic grammatical sentence which is the same order that morphemes

replacing subjects and objects take while attaching to verbs, nouns or prepositions.

3. Syntax. It is important to note that unlike English that has phrases that are

not complete sentences but rather constituents of a sentence, Arabic has verbal nominal

and compound sentence that could stand-alone. This structure was illustrated by

Wolfdietrich Fischer in his book A Grammar of Classical Arabic (Fischer 2002)10:

(1) Verbal Sentence: the predicate is the verb and the word order is

Verb-Subject (note that the object comes after the subject)

(2) Nominal Sentence: the predicate is the noun/pronoun and the word

order is subject-predicate or predicate subject.

10 Note that some phrases are not mentioned in this section such as the prepositional phrase for instance.

22

(3) Compound sentence: the predicate here is either a Nominal or

Verbal sentence connected to the subject by a pronoun or a suffix.

The word order here is subject-VS or subject-NS.

An example of a Verbal sentence could be fariha Ahmed meaning ‘Ahmed was

happy’, while a word-by-word translation would be ‘was happy Ahmed’. An example of

a Nominal sentence would be Anta said meaning ‘you are happy’, whereas the word-by-

word translation is ‘you happy’. In the case of a compound sentience of the form subject-

NS: hadha bayt-un djamil-un ‘this house-a nice-a’, ‘this is a nice house’, or the form

subject-VS: huwa yalbass-u al-kamiss ‘he put-s the-shirt’, it is important to show the

students how to draw basic trees to illustrate the syntax of Arabic as well as while there is

a difference between the syntax of Arabic and English in the surface structure but while

observing both languages’ underlying structures and applying the rules of syntax especial

X-bar syntactic theory, students will not that there is no difference in the deep structure.

It is very important for the instructor to offer many practicing problems to the

students from problems on drawing trees on grammatical sentences to problems with

non-grammatical sentences to show that although Arabic syntax might seem complicated

at first sight but while understanding the syntactic theories that binds English sentences

and its application to the English sentences, students will not a big similarity between the

application of these theories to Arabic sentences and would encourage them into solving

more complicated problems with complicated sentences.

5. Conclusion. It is quite important to learn the Arabic language background as well as

its linguistical aspects in order to either improve ones’ ability and skills in the Arabic

language itself or expand ones’ linguistics knowledge for further usage in other fields

23

such as computational linguistics, psychology (language and the brain, or cognition in

general), education (teaching Arabic from k-12 till college to professional levels),

military language training, and translations/interpretation. Although the field of Arabic

Linguistics is far larger than what this paper covered, however this paper offered the most

important aspects that someone should aim to study and learn in order to gain a strong

background of the functionality of the language. Therefore, it is important that while

offering the course to focus on the areas discussed above in just to be on the safe side of

not neglecting any important aspects of the Arabic linguistics.

24

Appendix-A

(Course Syllabus)

25

Suggested syllabus.

1. Course description. This is an introductory course to Arabic Linguistics. This

course covers the morphology, syntax and phonetics and phonology of the

language as well as the history and evolvement of the language. The course will

briefly go over important linguistics examples that are found in some spoken

Arabic dialects. A prerequisite of either a prior knowledge of basic linguistics or

knowledge of the language.

2. Required books.

[1] Fischer, W. c2002. A grammar of classical Arabic. Translated from German by

Jonathan Rodgers. Edition: 3rd rev. ed. Yale Language Series. New Haven: Yale

University Press.

[2] Ibrahim, Z., Aydelott S., Kassabgy, N. c2000. Diversity in language: contrastive

studies in Arabic and English theoretical and applied linguistics. Cairo; New York:

American University in Cairo Press.

References:

• Al-Khalesi, Yasin M. 2001. Modern Iraqi Arabic. Georgetown University Press.

• Harrell, R. S. 1965. Basic Course in Moroccan Arabic. Georgetown University

Press.

• Hussein, L. 1993. Levantine Arabic for Non-Natives: A Proficiency-Oriented

Approach. Yale University Press.

26

• Moore, Z. T., & English, M. 1998. Successful-teaching strategies: Findings from

a case study of middle school African Americans learning Arabic. Foreign

Language Annals, 31(3), 347-357.

3. Course outline.

a. Background of the language

i. Introduction to Semitic languages.

ii. History and development of the Arabic language.

b. The language writing system

i. The Arabic alphabets

c. Phonetics & Phonology

i. Place and manner of articulation of the Arabic sound system

ii. Arabic vowels and vowels markers

iii. Mapping Arabic letters to its corresponding international phonetics

alphabet (IPA) presentation.

iv. Phonemes in Arabic

v. Minimal pairs in Arabic

vi. Allophones in Arabic

vii. Syllable structure and syllabification

viii. Word stress

d. Morphology

i. Root and morpheme

ii. Nominal form morphology

iii. Verbal form morphology

27

e. Syntax

i. Part of speech/part of the sentence

ii. Clauses

iii. Tree structures

28

Appendix-B

(References)

29

References:

(LSA Style Sheet)

Al-Bataal M. 2002. Presentation about the Arabic language. The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education. Retrieved on April 9, 2004 from http://www.nitle.org/arabworld/audiovisual.php?module_id=1&selected_feed=68

Beeston, A. F. L. 1970. The Arabic Language Today. London: Hutchinson University library.

Chomsky, N. 1975. Reflections on Language. New York: Pantheon Books.

Faber, A. 1997. Genetic Sub-grouping of the Semitic Languages. Hetzron 3-15

Fischer, W. c2002. A grammar of classical Arabic. Translated from German by Jonathan Rodgers. Edition: 3rd rev. ed. Yale Language Series. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Holes, C. D. 1995. Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions, and Varieties. London & New York: Longman.

Howe, K. 2002. Learning to combat global terror. Monterey County Herald.

Keatley, Catherine. Robin, Richard. Ryding, Karin 2003. Preparing language instructors –A guide to the essentials of language teaching. Presented at the North-East Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (NECTFL). Retrieved March 27, 2004 from http://www.nclrc.org/nectfl2003.html#pli

Kramer, M. 2002. Arabic panic. The Middle East Quarterly, 9, 88-95.

Larsen-Freeman, D., and Long, Michael. 1991. An introduction to second language acquisition research. New York: Longman.

Littlefield, Heather. 2004. Suggestions concerning offering the course “Structure of Arabic”. An interview completed on April 17, 2004.

Mitchell, D. 2004. Louisiana State University: More LSU students studying Arabic. The America's Intelligence Wire.

Versteegh, K. c1997. The Arabic Language. Applied linguistics and language study. New York: Columbia University Press.

Watson, Janet C. E. 2002. The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic. New York: Oxford University Press.

30

Appendix-C

(Notes)

31

1. Summary about the presentation used:

a. Presentation by Dr. Mahmoud Al-Bataal.

Dr. Mahmoud Al-Bataal is the director of the language center and a

professor at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. In this presentation, he

discusses the connection between Arabic and Islam, its use as a religious

language, and the fact that Muslims view it as a sacred language. He also

discusses the spread of the language and the degree to which this status has

preserved the language from changing. He also discusses the varieties of

Arabic dialects, “the continuum between the classical Koran’s language and

the dialects”. Lastly, he talked about the role of satellite television in

facilitating understanding to the Arab World culture and keeping Arab in the

United States up to date with events. The presentation is available online in a

video format.

32

Appendix-D

(Figures)

33

Figure 1. The Arab World Map11.

Figure 2. This map is of the Islamic world12.

11 Source: The Arab American Encyclopedia 12 Source: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/world_maps/muslim_distribution.jpg Courtesy of The General Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin

34

Figure 3: The International Phonetic Alphabet for sounds found in some languages13.

Figure 4: This figure illustrates the Arabic Alphabet with the possible phonemic representations of each letter.

13 Source: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/rthompso/ipachart.html. Note that some of the Arabic phonemes are not present there this is because they are allophones of the same phoneme.

35

Appendix-E

(Interview Summary)

36

Interview with Professor Heather Littlefield. Professor Littlefield is currently the interim

director for the Linguistics Program at Northeastern University and has been a lecturer in

the linguistics program for the last five years.

Question 1: Having taught some cross socio linguistics courses such as “Language

and Gender” or “Language and Culture” at Northeastern University, how do you feel

about the idea of offering a course(s) in Arabic Linguistics as a cross listed Linguistics

course with Modern Languages?

Prof. Littlefield: I think this is a good idea.

Question 2: From your experience of giving students problems in Arabic Linguistics,

did you encounter any difficulties from the student ‘s side? If any, then do you think that

a course of Arabic Linguistics is enough to cover the linguistics aspects behind the

language?

Prof. Littlefield: Yes. That is why I give them such Arabic problems to solve. The course

should be titled “Structure of Arabic” and should be offered as one course. The course

would not produce Arabic linguists but rather give a flavor to the Arabic linguistics. The

term “Arabic linguists” often refers to linguists who are native speakers of Arabic.

Question3: Lastly, given the two notions of "teacher-centered" meaning that the

focus is on the teacher as the evaluator and the responder to questions, while student

would work alone, and "student-centered" meaning that the focus is on the students, in

the way that they will work in groups, exchange answers to problems and evaluate each

other's. What notion do you suggest to be the theme of the course I am suggesting?

Prof. Littlefield: I think that the course theme should be as a combination of the two

notions.

37

Appendix-F

(Linguistics Terms Glossary)

38

Acoustic phonetics is a technical area of linguistics. Phoneticians depict and analyze

sound waves using machines and computer programs.

Affixation is the morphological process whereby an affix is attached to a root or stem.

Allophone is a phonetic variant of a phoneme in a particular language.

Aspirated consonant: a consonant that is followed by the production of a buff of air

while pronouncing it.

Articulation process is the modification of sound waves produced by the air stream,

phonation, and oral-nasal processes.

Case is a grammatical category determined by the syntactic or semantic function of the

noun or pronoun.

Clause is a grammatical unit that includes, at minimum, a predicate and an explicit or

implied subject.

Consonant is a sound made by a partial or complete closure of the vocal tract.

Diphthong is a phonetic sequence, consisting of a vowel and a glide that is interpreted as

a single vowel.

A free morpheme is a grammatical unit that can occur by it. However, morphemes such

as affixes can be attached to it.

Free variation is the interchangeable relationship between two distinctive sounds, in

which they may substitute for one another in the same environment without causing a

change in meaning.

Genitive case is a case in which the referent of the marked noun is the possessor of the

referent of another noun.

39

Glottal stop is a speech sound articulated by a momentary, complete closing of the

glottis in the back of the throat. Glottal stops occur in many languages and usually pattern

as consonants.

Glottis is the space between the vocal folds.

Intonation is the system of levels (rising and falling) and variations in pitch sequences

within speech.

Labialisation is a way of pronouncing a sound or sounds (consonants and vowels by

using one or both lips.

Manner of articulation is the type of closure made by the articulators and the degree of

the obstruction of the air-stream by those articulators.

Minimal pair is two words that differ in only one sound.

Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in the grammar of a language.

Morphological process is a means of changing a stem to adjust its meaning to fit its

syntactic and communicational context.

Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words.

Nominal is a word that has the same functions of a noun.

Nuclear syllable is a syllable that carries maximum prominence, usually due to being

stressed.

Onset is the part of the syllable that precedes the vowel of the syllable.

Open class is a grammatical class of words with a potentially unlimited membership.

These words have content meaning.

Phonological derivation is the set of stages used to generate the phonetic representation

of a word from its underlying representation.

40

Personal pronoun is a pronoun that expresses a distinction in the type of subject person.

Phone is an unanalyzed sound of a language. It is the smallest identifiable unit found in a

stream of speech that can be transcribed with an IPA symbol.

Phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language.

Phonetics is the study of human speech sounds.

Phonology is the study of how sounds are organized and used in natural languages.

Phrase is a syntactic structure that consists of more than one word but lacks the subject-

predicate organization of a clause.

Pitch is the rate of vibration of the vocal folds.

Place of articulation is the relationship between the active and passive articulators as

they shape or impede the air stream.

Pronoun is a pro-form which functions like a noun and substitutes for a noun or noun-

phrase.

Semantic role is the underlying relationship that a participant has with the main verb in a

clause.

Stem is the root or roots of a word, together with any bound morphemes.

Stress is an increase in the activity of the vocal apparatus of a speaker

Syllabification is the process in which consonants function on the periphery of a syllable.

Syllable is a unit of sound composed of a central peak of sonority (usually a vowel), and

the consonants that cluster around this central peak.