n8an wrote:what is TAM/TPAM?
T = Tense
P = Person
A = Aspect
M = Mood
There is also voice, but I don't think I've ever seen voice used in an abbreviation describing the categories of verb conjugation.
n8an wrote:Have you thought any more about which dialect(s) you'd like to learn?
Not too much; I'm finding this thread fascinating, but I think my initial desire may have been more of a wanderlust. I think I'm leaning more toward Egypt or another Levantine dialect. I have a co-worker who's from Egypt, so I could maybe practice with him.
linguoboy wrote:Classical Arabic (remember, dialects do not descend from MSA; they've evolved in parallel)
I didn't know that, which influenced my questions. I guess it makes sense though, it definitely is more likely a standard written and spoken form (or several standard spoken forms) would develop in tandem versus the latter descending from the former. I suppose that would probably be the same in Tamil, although since the Sri Lankan Tamil spoken varieties are generally considered pretty similar to Written Tamil and the Indian Tamil spoken varieties are more divergent, I thought the spoken varieties descended from the written form.
eskandar wrote:Something interesting about the varied pronunciation of ق in Jordan is that, unlike in most other dialects, the difference is gendered rather than being about rural/urban or regional divides. Jordanian men tend to pronounce it as 'g' whereas women pronounce it as a glottal stop.
Do you know why or how this developed? If this gender division more or less holds true across regions, I find that very fascinating! I could see there being an initial gender divide on the pronunciation, but I would have also figured regional variations would have created further division. Though I guess the regional variations are probably along other lines or phenomena, while this pronunciation difference has held, which then makes me think it must've developed earlier on in the Jordanian dialect.
mōdgethanc wrote:I'm not - it's very common for languages to lose declensions and move towards a more analytical kind of grammar over time. English went from being quite heavily inflected to having barely any case marking over the last 1000 years. Also Hebrew doesn't have them and it's an extremely old language. Arabic is in some ways more conservative than Hebrew despite being younger.
Based on the knowledge that both MSA and the spoken dialects derived from Classical Arabic, then I'm not surprised either. When I wrote that, I believed that it basically went Classical Arabic > MSA > spoken dialects, and that the time between MSA and the dialects wasn't that great, hence the surprise that the cases would've fallen out of use fairly quickly.
voron wrote:Besides what linguoboy said, here are examples of a progressive aspect in Levantine and Egyptian.
Levantine:
I talk - بحكي
I am talking - عم بحكي
The particle عم is used
Egyptian:
I talk -بحكي
I am talking, I keep talking - عمّال بحكي
The particle عمّال is used, and the modality is different than in Levantine. It's not just "to be talking" but rather "to keep talking, to talk incessantly".
I may be wrong but I think both these particles come from the verb عمل (which means "to work" in MSA and "to do" in dialects).
That's really fascinating for me - the idea that in Egyptian, the progressive aspect took on a repetitive connotation. It also makes sense I think that the particles came from a verb meaning "to work/do".
voron wrote:Just this little aspect of dialects shows that they are not that simple at all compared to MSA -- they may be simpler in inflectional morphology, but more difficult in syntax and phonology.
I think that's generally true though, isn't it, of inflectional versus analytical languages? Languages that lost their inflections over time would have had to become stricter in syntax to account for that loss.