Brought together in this volume are fourteen studies using a range of modern instrumental methods – acoustic and articulatory – to investigate the phonetics of several North African and Middle Eastern varieties of Arabic. Topics covered include syllable structure, quantity, assimilation, guttural… read more
This chapter examines phonation categories and glottal states in the Modern South Arabian language, Mehri, as spoken in southern Oman and eastern Yemen with reference also to its sister language, Śḥerɛ̄t, and in San’ani Arabic from an Emergent Features perspective (Mielke, 2008). Within the paper,… read more
This paper explores conceptual and descriptive parallels between the Ancient Greek ψιλά–δασέα distinction as found in the Peripatetic text De Audibilibus, and the gˇahr–hams distinction in the medieval Arabic writings of Al-Ḫalīl (d. c.786 A.D.) and Sībawayhi (d. c.796 A.D.). In both cases there… read more
In this chapter we present and discuss analyses of instrumental data from nine speakers of Jordanian Arabic. They show that the main articulatory and acoustic differences between plain and emphatic coronal consonants involve changes in the relative volumes and resonance frequencies of the buccal… read more
Instrumental data from seven speakers of Jordanian Arabic are analysed to gain further understanding of the production of the laryngeal and pharyngeal phonemes and their phonetic and phonological relationships. Results from nasoendoscopy and videofluoroscopy show that the extent of retraction of… read more
Since the time of Sībawayh over twelve hundred years ago the phenomenon of manner assimilation among sonorant coronal consonants in Arabic has been recognised. In this chapter we present analysis of electropalatographic and acoustic data from three female speakers of Syrian Arabic to investigate… read more
