UniLang

Could you link a video where someone speaks Standard Arabic (with all the correct ta marbutas etc..)? I'd like to hear how it sounds. Thank you in advance!

You can hear someone speaking standard Arabic with all of the i3raab (case endings) here for example.

Thank you eskandar!

When the article and other nouns and certain verb forms with an initial hamzatu l-qati are preceded by another word or prefix, they lose their initial hamzatu with its vowel. Instead the sign of waslah is written in their place over the alif, e.g.

بَابُ ٱلْبَيْت

In MSA this is pronounced "baabu l-bayt". I would like to know what the usual pronunciation of the above phrase in colloquial Arabic is - since the final vowels are lost, so that in the example above the first word is pronounced "baab", without the final 'u'. So, what is the correct pronunciation of باب البيت in colloquial arabic? Is it "Baab al-bayt", "baab əl-bayt" (with a schwa), "baab 'al-bayt" or something different?

Thank you!

If you mean the pronunciation in Egyptian, it would be something akin to /bæːb l̩beːt/

Thank you, Mike. So, in Egyptian Arabic, the 'alif of the article and the glottal stop (hamzah) are deleted even though the preceding word ends with a consonant.
Now, the question is: does this happen even in the other varieties of Arabic? Can anyone answer my question? Thank you!

أمام البيت حديقة

means "there's a garden in front of the house". Can I say the same sentence this way?

توجد حديقة أمام البيت .


Thank you!

I would say there's a bit of difference between the two sentences. The first is "there is a garden in front of the house" whereas the second sentence would put more emphasis on the "is", something like "there exists a garden in front of the house" or "a garden exists in front of the house".

Thank you!

Could the second sentence be the answer to this question: "Is not the garden in front of the house?"

I don't think so. Using توجد is more like "exists" than "is" in my opinion. Also if the question is "Is not the garden in front of the house?" you'll need the article in Arabic as well:

eskandar wrote:بلی

Persian?

Actually, I've just found بلى in my Arabic-Hebrew dictionary with the meaning yes. I suspect all the other ى's in eskander's text - which should have been ي's - are the result of using a Persian keyboard or something, but بلى specifically is correct
(unless you meant to ask whether it's Persian in origin, and if it is, then I'm just blabbering off-topic )

voron wrote:

eskandar wrote:بلی

Persian?

Actually it is originally an Arabic word, and was the original source of the Persian بله (corrupted from Arabic بلی).

بلی in Arabic is a specific kind of 'yes'. It is an affirmative answer to a negative question, like "on the contrary, yes!" or equivalent to the Persian "چرا" or French "(mais) si!". For example:

1Q. Is he Hasan?
1A. Yes, he is Hasan.

2Q. Isn't he Hasan? / Is he not Hasan?
2A. Yes, he is Hasan.

The above would be translated as follows in Arabic, to the best of my knowledge:



As Massimiliano's question was negative ("Is not the garden in front of the house?") with an affirmative answer, if I'm not mistaken بلی should be used in place of نعم here.

See for example this section of Qur'an 7:172



(God said to them) "Am I not your Lord?" They said "yes"

Again, بلی (balaa) is used because it is an affirmative answer to a negative question.

Babelfish wrote:I suspect all the other ى's in eskander's text - which should have been ي's - are the result of using a Persian keyboard or something

Yes, you're exactly right, but how could you tell? I figured no one would be able to tell whether the ي in حديقة (for example) was really a ي or a ی since it's not final. Is it showing up poorly for you?

eskandar wrote:بلی in Arabic is a specific kind of 'yes'. It is an affirmative answer to a negative question, like "on the contrary, yes!" or equivalent to the Persian "چرا" or French "(mais) si!".

Ah yes I remembered now, there was a chapter about it in Madinah Arabic. Yes I initially thought that you had used the Persian "yes" instead of the Arabic one.

eskandar wrote:I don't think so. Using توجد is more like "exists" than "is" in my opinion. Also if the question is "Is not the garden in front of the house?" you'll need the article in Arabic as well:

سؤال: الیست الحدیقة امام البیت؟
جواب: بلی، الحدیقة امام البیت.

Thank you!

I don't if it is related to bali in Persian/Arabic but in one of the Lebanese textbooks they say in the Lebanese dialect you can use mbala or bala for yes.

eskandar wrote:بلی in Arabic is a specific kind of 'yes'. It is an affirmative answer to a negative question, like "on the contrary, yes!"

Interesting, I didn't know that!

eskandar wrote:

Babelfish wrote:I suspect all the other ى's in eskander's text - which should have been ي's - are the result of using a Persian keyboard or something

Yes, you're exactly right, but how could you tell? I figured no one would be able to tell whether the ي in حديقة (for example) was really a ي or a ی since it's not final. Is it showing up poorly for you?

Yes - in the middle of a word the ى doesn't connect to the following letter, but is rendered as a final (and without the two dots below), e.g. حدى​قة (here I stuck a zero-width space after ى, so that it hopefully it doesn't connect on your computer as well and you can see what I mean)

Babelfish wrote:Yes - in the middle of a word the ى doesn't connect to the following letter, but is rendered as a final (and without the two dots below), e.g. حدى​قة (here I stuck a zero-width space after ى, so that it hopefully it doesn't connect on your computer as well and you can see what I mean)

How weird, it shows up just fine on my computer (I checked in Firefox as well as Chrome) as you can see:



But anyway, I'll stop being lazy and use the Arabic keyboard in the future to avoid this issue.

Massimiliano B wrote:Thank you, Mike. So, in Egyptian Arabic, the 'alif of the article and the glottal stop (hamzah) are deleted even though the preceding word ends with a consonant.
Now, the question is: does this happen even in the other varieties of Arabic? Can anyone answer my question? Thank you!

I know the question is pretty old, but my Yemeni friends would pronounce it as /baab al-bayt/. If they were in a hurry, the a in the article would get dropped.

Hello,

I didn't see a Translations thread so I'll ask here. I'm sorry if I'm in the wrong thread.

A friend of mine received today some messages on Whatsapp from an unknown number. It's in romanization and I also guess it's Moroccan dialect, but I would be thankful if you guys could translate them for us.

They are here:


Could someone help me?

Thank you very much.