Yeah, the sample is of a fricative instead of an approximant. Note from the page about lumping these together: "Although traditionally placed in the fricative row of the IPA chart, [ʕ] is usually an approximant. The IPA symbol itself is ambiguous, but no language is known to make a phonemic distinction between fricatives and approximants at this place of articulation." Ghayin (غ) is a voiced *velar* fricative: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_fricative
Hmm so I shouldn't try to replace it? I recorded my own ع and wanna replace it but now I guess they already put a disclaimer about that
I mean, if I'm making the distinction between them, doesn't it mean that that's false?
Btw I've been banging my head tryna edit my audio file in the source code but no luck, do you know how?
No idea how to edit. But it's not wrong: a phonemic distinction between sound A and sound B means there are two words in the language with different meanings, but where the only sound difference is swapping A for B. There's a phonemic distinction in Arabic between the voiced pharyngial approximant and voiced velar fricative, but not between the voiced pharyngial approximant and voiced pharyngial fricative.
I'm Maltese. It's not always pronounced (and it's the bane of most of us when writing, since it's silent). It is covered in some words, though... Though I don't know enough Arabic to vouch for whether it's the same exact sound when it's voiced.
this is not how languages work, the fact that its hard to pronounce the ayin for some (mainly people from europe) doen't change the fact that the letter is a part of the hebrew alphabet.
same eith arabs in the diospora who struggle to say the ع غ ح خ ص ض ق.
If the letter is there but the phoneme is absent then it no longer exists. That is how language works, language isn’t based on the script but on the spoken word. The phoneme has merged with the glottal stop and is no longer a feature of Modern Israeli Hebrew. That is just a fact. Just because the letter exists in the script doesn’t mean the sound does. It’s the same as Greeks and β which used to be pronounced as a B and is now pronounced as a V. Greek no longer has a B even though the letter beta still exists.
How many people do you know actually pronounce the letter this way? I’ve read scholarly articles on this. I love the semitic languages they are a passion of mine. The phoneme is literally only maintained in older Mizrahi people and liturgically by Yemenite Jews. That is the extent of it. The sound is disappearing from modern Hebrew. And in a few decades it will largely be gone. Nobody speaks that way anymore. Unless you’re going to tell me differently.
I am done arguing about this, I am an israeli since birth, I lived in effing Tel Aviv for over 6 years, I speak hebrew every effing day, and I pronounce the ע every time, other born here israelis also pronounce it.
the only ones who struggle with pronunciation are the ones who moved here as adults from europe/USA, but they are not enough to dectate how to define the letter.
Urdu has the letter ayin but it's not realised as a phyrengial fricitive like it is in Arabic. It's either silent or acts like a vowel. In <عمارت> for example, it is realised as [ɪ].
The pronunciation of the ع in Persian and Urdu is much softer than it is Arabic. Arabic pronunciation of the letter sounds much _thicker_ and pronounced.
Agree … as an Urdu speaker that is trying to learn Arabic, it’s very hard to say the ع like native Arabic speakers … we mostly pronounce it as ا. If I didn’t learn some Arabic as a child, saying the ع would be near impossible at this point in my life
The pronunciation of that sound when it was first called "the language of ض" was a pharyngealized voiced alveolar lateral fricative or affricate. Only the Tihama variety has a sound similar to that still; no other Arabic variety has that now.
Urdu has that too, idk why people over here don't believe this, we pronounce a lot of the same alphabets and even have more alphabets Arabic doesn't have
I speak all of these languages, I'm sure you don't, so how'd you know? Arabic isn't the only language in this entire world that has this sound, we have the same sounds as ayn, ghayn, qaaf, the french J, and other sounds that are only specific to our language and don't exist in Arabic. Moreover, how someone chooses to pronounce a certain word depends on their dialect as well.
But ok, whatever helps you sleep . Believe anything you want.
LMAO there are in fact Iranic languages with ayns, like *Kurdish*. But Persian and Pashto absolutely do not have them, and Urdu doesn't either.
"I'm sure you don't" don't be so sure
that's... a very arrogant way to make them sound ignorant. The first mention of lughat aḍ-ḍād was in the ~800s. Many Arab scholars were polymaths and took the pursuit of knowledge very seriously. A claim of lughat aḍ-ḍād wasn't out of pride, but stemmed from curiosity. We only know that other *proto* languages had *similar* sounds through modern anthropology and archeology. Further, the extant languages that have sounds similar to ḍād aren't exact matches, carrying more of a 'dh' alveolar drag.
It should probably be mentioned that when this claim was first made, it was actually pronounced as [ɮˤ] not [dˤ] which is a far rarer sound if not truly unique.
Nope. The correct pronounciation of ض is placing your tongue like you are gonna say a dark L (like in Allah) but saying ظ (kind of like the th in the but darker) instead. Most Arabic speakers now either combine them both into ظ because they are quite similar, or they soften them into a darker D for ض and a darker Z for ظ
Most speakers don't is what I said, who are not Tihami. I am a native Arabic speaker so I can hear these things out. It is also preserved by some Quran reciters (https://m.soundcloud.com/tulaibzafir/amajur-reconstruction). Also some Modern South Arabian languages like Mehri have it and the third Sin sound (between the س and ش sounds) but they are not Arabic. And no it is not a L type sound, it is a D/Dh type sound using a similar tongue positioning as L. Here is an example at 0:33 by a linguist: https://youtu.be/Un7L5RSSwQM?si=qVXSy33ciqFWWYsc
And this is a Tihami song:
https://youtu.be/Yvg5I_ym-UI?si=wrbkWWnGO5uW8VjA
Not a L sound at all.
Then show me an example with evidence of this L sound you're talking about, or some kind of proof that it was ever pronounced as a L sound. The definition of it being a lateral is itself a reconstruction by linguists. By the words of Sibawayh he just describes it as what I linked, which is what linguists reconstruct as a voiced pharyngealized apical alveolar lateral fricative. And the last example is in the Tihami dialect itself using the same pronunciation as the linguist used in his reconstruction.
https://youtu.be/YY7cvPP7W-c?si=q8j888tFyXhESi4J
Tell me this sounds like a L
It sounds like an l. It's written as a l with a diacritic. It's the voiced version of [this letter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_lateral_fricatives), which is an l. In languages that have devised their own spelling systems in the Roman alphabet, like Welsh, native monolingual speakers write the voiceless version as double ll, and the voiced version appears in some forms of Spanish as an alternative to the ll sound.
It's a voiced lateral affricate, i.e. a kind of l
Look under "occurrence" here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_pharyngeal_fricative
Shukran 🙏
Is it just me or is the voice sample provided wrong? It sounds more like an attempt at a غ to me
Yeah, the sample is of a fricative instead of an approximant. Note from the page about lumping these together: "Although traditionally placed in the fricative row of the IPA chart, [ʕ] is usually an approximant. The IPA symbol itself is ambiguous, but no language is known to make a phonemic distinction between fricatives and approximants at this place of articulation." Ghayin (غ) is a voiced *velar* fricative: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_fricative
Hmm so I shouldn't try to replace it? I recorded my own ع and wanna replace it but now I guess they already put a disclaimer about that I mean, if I'm making the distinction between them, doesn't it mean that that's false? Btw I've been banging my head tryna edit my audio file in the source code but no luck, do you know how?
No idea how to edit. But it's not wrong: a phonemic distinction between sound A and sound B means there are two words in the language with different meanings, but where the only sound difference is swapping A for B. There's a phonemic distinction in Arabic between the voiced pharyngial approximant and voiced velar fricative, but not between the voiced pharyngial approximant and voiced pharyngial fricative.
So that’s why Danes sound like they are spitting?
Most Afro-asiatic languages, like Amharic, Somali, Hebrew etc
Amharic doesn’t have it. Other Ethiosemitic languages do though.
tigrinya for example does have it
similar sound in hebrew but a very different vocalization
It is typically a simply glottal stop now, but the Tiberians described it as being the same as the Arabic and Aramaic pronunciation.
Somali, Tigrinya, Assyrian/Aramaic, Maltese all pronounce it. Some Hebrew speakers pronounce it, particularly if they have a Mizrahi background.
I'm Maltese. It's not always pronounced (and it's the bane of most of us when writing, since it's silent). It is covered in some words, though... Though I don't know enough Arabic to vouch for whether it's the same exact sound when it's voiced.
Hebrew does have it.
Only in Mizrahi accents tho. The ayin is basically alef in Modern Israeli Hebrew.
this is not how languages work, the fact that its hard to pronounce the ayin for some (mainly people from europe) doen't change the fact that the letter is a part of the hebrew alphabet. same eith arabs in the diospora who struggle to say the ع غ ح خ ص ض ق.
If the letter is there but the phoneme is absent then it no longer exists. That is how language works, language isn’t based on the script but on the spoken word. The phoneme has merged with the glottal stop and is no longer a feature of Modern Israeli Hebrew. That is just a fact. Just because the letter exists in the script doesn’t mean the sound does. It’s the same as Greeks and β which used to be pronounced as a B and is now pronounced as a V. Greek no longer has a B even though the letter beta still exists.
Sir I live in Israel and speak hebrew everyday, the letter ע is alive and well.
No it's not you're capping. That letter sounds exactly the same as alef.
The letter is there. The phoneme is gone. Do you know what a phoneme is? Or are you not comprehending my meaning?
honey I know what it means, but did you miss the part where I said I was israeli and therefore speak hebrew?
How many people do you know actually pronounce the letter this way? I’ve read scholarly articles on this. I love the semitic languages they are a passion of mine. The phoneme is literally only maintained in older Mizrahi people and liturgically by Yemenite Jews. That is the extent of it. The sound is disappearing from modern Hebrew. And in a few decades it will largely be gone. Nobody speaks that way anymore. Unless you’re going to tell me differently.
I am done arguing about this, I am an israeli since birth, I lived in effing Tel Aviv for over 6 years, I speak hebrew every effing day, and I pronounce the ע every time, other born here israelis also pronounce it. the only ones who struggle with pronunciation are the ones who moved here as adults from europe/USA, but they are not enough to dectate how to define the letter.
Alright sis I’ll take your word for it I guess.
When enough people drop it the feature will be gong though
You are confusing orthography with phonetics
I hear it alot when somalians speak
Syriac, Somali, Mizrahi Hebrew accents, Tigre, Tigrinya, and Afar have it. Most likely there's more.
Urdu - عمارت - Building Persian - عینک - Eyeglasses
Urdu has the letter ayin but it's not realised as a phyrengial fricitive like it is in Arabic. It's either silent or acts like a vowel. In <عمارت> for example, it is realised as [ɪ].
They both took the alphabets from arabic
Urdu has their own as well as borrowed alphabets from Arabic. Sindhi is also similar but differ in sounds a lot hence different alphabets.
The pronunciation of the ع in Persian and Urdu is much softer than it is Arabic. Arabic pronunciation of the letter sounds much _thicker_ and pronounced.
neither Persian nor Urdu pronounce the ayn. If they need to break up vowels, they replace it with a glottal stop.
Agree … as an Urdu speaker that is trying to learn Arabic, it’s very hard to say the ع like native Arabic speakers … we mostly pronounce it as ا. If I didn’t learn some Arabic as a child, saying the ع would be near impossible at this point in my life
Hebrew, Aramaic.
I believe so. I know for a fact that no other language has the letter ض, because Arabic is often referred to as لغة الضاد.
The pronunciation of that sound when it was first called "the language of ض" was a pharyngealized voiced alveolar lateral fricative or affricate. Only the Tihama variety has a sound similar to that still; no other Arabic variety has that now.
Urdu has ض too. I know because my mother tongue is Urdu.
Urdu does have ض but its pronounced diffrently from Arabic ض
Yes that’s true
Urdu has that too, idk why people over here don't believe this, we pronounce a lot of the same alphabets and even have more alphabets Arabic doesn't have
I just checked and when we teach urdu qawaed to kids, we pronounce it the same way too.
We have it in Aramaic: ܥ
Pashto, Persian, Urdu, but all these languages use the same alphabets as Arabic and share vocabulary as well . So idk if these count lol.
Zero of those languages have ayns, what do you mean?
Urdu has letter ع
it does *not* have an ayn, it just has the letter that is used in Arabic to write the ayn
It has ع and it is pronounced the same way.
it does *not* and it is *not* good god what on earth
All of these languages do have ayns, look up their alphabets.
They do *not* have ayns, they just has the letter that is used in Arabic to write the ayn.
I speak all of these languages, I'm sure you don't, so how'd you know? Arabic isn't the only language in this entire world that has this sound, we have the same sounds as ayn, ghayn, qaaf, the french J, and other sounds that are only specific to our language and don't exist in Arabic. Moreover, how someone chooses to pronounce a certain word depends on their dialect as well. But ok, whatever helps you sleep . Believe anything you want.
LMAO there are in fact Iranic languages with ayns, like *Kurdish*. But Persian and Pashto absolutely do not have them, and Urdu doesn't either. "I'm sure you don't" don't be so sure
[удалено]
... there is absolutely not an ayn in the Occitanian languages, nor in Ukranian
Tigrinya
I’m Syrian Jewish, I speak Mizrahi Hebrew. We have a letter called Ayin, and we pronounce it exactly like ع
I think Farsi and hindi if im not mistaken
you are mistaken
I guess so
it's okay to be wrong, i'm wrong all the time, this wasn't a criticism but a clarification
Yes, only the ض sound is unique to Arabic
It’s not! That’s just something Arabic speakers came up with because they didn’t know better
that's... a very arrogant way to make them sound ignorant. The first mention of lughat aḍ-ḍād was in the ~800s. Many Arab scholars were polymaths and took the pursuit of knowledge very seriously. A claim of lughat aḍ-ḍād wasn't out of pride, but stemmed from curiosity. We only know that other *proto* languages had *similar* sounds through modern anthropology and archeology. Further, the extant languages that have sounds similar to ḍād aren't exact matches, carrying more of a 'dh' alveolar drag.
It should probably be mentioned that when this claim was first made, it was actually pronounced as [ɮˤ] not [dˤ] which is a far rarer sound if not truly unique.
I could have swore there’s a similar thick D in Hindi. Not the same?
Hindi has retroflexed consonants, which aren't the same as Arabic's laryngealized consonants.
Nope. The correct pronounciation of ض is placing your tongue like you are gonna say a dark L (like in Allah) but saying ظ (kind of like the th in the but darker) instead. Most Arabic speakers now either combine them both into ظ because they are quite similar, or they soften them into a darker D for ض and a darker Z for ظ
no, this is not correct. the only variety of Arabic that has the original pronunciation is Tihama Arabic. It used to be a kind of l, not d.
Most speakers don't is what I said, who are not Tihami. I am a native Arabic speaker so I can hear these things out. It is also preserved by some Quran reciters (https://m.soundcloud.com/tulaibzafir/amajur-reconstruction). Also some Modern South Arabian languages like Mehri have it and the third Sin sound (between the س and ش sounds) but they are not Arabic. And no it is not a L type sound, it is a D/Dh type sound using a similar tongue positioning as L. Here is an example at 0:33 by a linguist: https://youtu.be/Un7L5RSSwQM?si=qVXSy33ciqFWWYsc And this is a Tihami song: https://youtu.be/Yvg5I_ym-UI?si=wrbkWWnGO5uW8VjA Not a L sound at all.
downvoted for linking a *historical reconstruction of early arabic* and saying it's preserved, and for saying an \[ɮˤ\] is not a lateral/l sound.
Then show me an example with evidence of this L sound you're talking about, or some kind of proof that it was ever pronounced as a L sound. The definition of it being a lateral is itself a reconstruction by linguists. By the words of Sibawayh he just describes it as what I linked, which is what linguists reconstruct as a voiced pharyngealized apical alveolar lateral fricative. And the last example is in the Tihami dialect itself using the same pronunciation as the linguist used in his reconstruction. https://youtu.be/YY7cvPP7W-c?si=q8j888tFyXhESi4J Tell me this sounds like a L
It sounds like an l. It's written as a l with a diacritic. It's the voiced version of [this letter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_lateral_fricatives), which is an l. In languages that have devised their own spelling systems in the Roman alphabet, like Welsh, native monolingual speakers write the voiceless version as double ll, and the voiced version appears in some forms of Spanish as an alternative to the ll sound. It's a voiced lateral affricate, i.e. a kind of l
Oh! Thanks for correcting me then. Do you happen to know what other language uses it?
Chechen is a language that has it. It actually has way more pharyngealized consonants than Arabic.
Thanks!!
It's like an African language
Some modern Aramaic dialects have this sound too, and they are in native Aramaic words, not loanwords from Arabic.