Language Overview: Arabic

شكراً لكل أساتذتي العربية في جامعة بيتسبورغ!

Links:

Translations:
0:07: What will happen if you see this video without having watched the other one [Visible confusion]
0:15: Yo dawg I herd you like languages so I put some languages inside of yo’ language
3:12: Arabic pronunciations shift into MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE
3:18: I don’t wanna say all that
3:28: Me when it’s time to describe the rare phonemes in Arabic
3:50: How many rare phonemes does Arabic have? IT’S OVER 9,000!
4:20: Never let them know your next move
6:38: So nothing about the other dialects.
6:53: Vowels? Ain’t nobody got time for that!
6:57: Sorry I don’t speak that language
7:36: You are in this abjad, but we do not grant you the rank of letter.
9:54: When you can’t even talk about sentences without complications due to the dialects
11:28: (Predictable grammar) This is brilliant. (Long lists) But I like this.
14:05: Why is it, when something happens, it’s always you three? (First root, second root, third root)
14:07: Live look-in on an Arabic noun pluralizing
15:17: Oh, you thought you were safe with the feminine nouns? Think again.
15:32: I’m watching y’all… feminine nouns
17:27: Two men (not using the dual)... Two men (using the dual)
18:35: Don’t worry guys, Arabic will help y’all
19:55: Thinking you have a break from Arabic’s confusion
21:37: The wilderness must be explored!
22:12: But wait, there’s more
22:55: The example verbs will be…
25:06: Just deal with it
28:12: Infinitive verbs… The gerund or present
28:42: Me after trying that sentence
28:54: Lions aren’t human? I’ll eat you. (The adjective “human” is written as though lions are people, for the joke)

[alamira.]

This is genuinely ludicrous that I am lucky enough to have found this channel. Cannot believe there is such a professional FREE video that gives you a phenomenal overview of all that you need to know about such a complicated language. I wish you the best of luck man

[YaBoiHakim]

Very decent video, you did a good job.
One bit of advice though, relax when speaking Arabic, you over-pronounce way too much. Bring it down to 60% and re-evaluate; you'll sound a lot more natural. It's very common with American English speakers learning Arabic, and with those that have a Hebrew background (which seemingly you do).

[alamira.]

Not to mention how you made me, a native speaker, feel as if you knew more about the language than I did. Truly impressive that you do this with so many different languages.

[ryuko]

Here are some notes:
- "South Semitic" is an incredibly outdated theory, Old/Ancient South Arabian (also called Sayhadic to avoid the connection with Modern South Arabian) is now classified as a Central Semitic branch, while Afro-Semitic/Ethio-Semitic and Modern South Arabian are separate branches of West Semitic which Central Semitic is a part of as well.
- You seem to struggle with /ħ/ which is completely understandable, no judgment, but I would note that most Arabic speakers finding approximating /ħ/ with [x] or [χ] to be unpleasant and suggest approximating it with [h] instead!
- Classical Arabic is not based on Old Hejazi, it was a mixture of conservative dialects that are more conservative than attestations of Old Hejazi. Old Hejazi is the dialect the Qur'an was written in, so Old Hejazi was still super influential.
- the affect of substrate languages on Arabic dialect is very often exaggerated, of course there was some effects, but a lot of evolutions can simply be explained as the dialects evolving and differentiating over time like any other language.
- While most dialects of Urban Levantine do have q > ʔ, saying that all of Levantine has that is an oversimplification as the Levant (especially Palestine) has the most diverse reflexes of *q which include [q], [ʔ], [g], [kˤ], [k], [ħ], and [ʕ]. A fascinating detail is that in the capital of Jordan, Amman, the reflex [g] is considered masculine while the [ʔ] is considered feminine, but because children tend to talk more with their mothers than their fathers, a man speaking with *q [ʔ] is common when they are at home or with very close people but speaking [g] is the default in public.
- Similar to the previous point the natural evolution of Classical /θ ð ðˤ ɮˤ/ to /t d dˤ dˤ/ and the reloaning of MSA /θ ð ðˤ dˤ/ as /s z zˤ dˤ/ is not an element of all Levantine dialects, as some still preserve interdentals so Classical /θ ð ðˤ ɮˤ/ end up as /θ ð ðˤ ðˤ/ and MSA /θ ð ðˤ dˤ/ are loaned as /θ ð ðˤ ðˤ/.
- Also Levantine Arabic dialects usually have more phonemes than that as emphatic harmony (a pharyngealized sound spreading it's pharyngealization to the rest of the word) has introduced /mˤ/ and /bˤ/ to many dialects, and some (especially in Jordan and Palestine) innovating a /rˤ/ too.
- /lˤ/ is a separate phoneme from /l/ in both MSA and most Arabic dialects, in MSA and Classical Arabic it only exists in one word /(ʔa)lˤlˤaːh/ but sound changes and compounds has introduced extra sources of /lˤ/ in many dialects.
- at the end of a word gemination is usually (but not necessarily) not maintained, the reason why it's important to always remember if a word ends with a geminate is for knowing how to pronounce it with a suffix: /ħubb/ can be [ħubb] or [ħub] but /ħubbi/ *has* to be [ħubbi].
- [sˤeːf] is a very common pronunciation of the word "summer", you might be mistaking it with people who preserve diphthongs as they do [sæjf~sɛjf] and [sˤɑjf], preserving diphthongs (even if inconsistently) is one of the rare features of Levantine Arabic that isn't that common in other dialects.
- Levantine also has a lot of vowel reduction! the actual reason Maghrebi dialects (Morocca, Algeria, Tunisia) are hard to understand for people in the Eastern Arabic speaking world is because media from the East commonly spreads west but not vice versa, so Moroccan have more exposure to Egyptian and Levantine than vice versa. Another is that Maghrebi dialects tend to preserve different words from Classical Arabic that others might not be familiar with. Add to that how common it is for Moroccans to insert a lot of French in casual speech and you get a recipe for being hard to understand!
- Actually Persian and Urdu orthographies are more conservative than Arabic on how the letter *yā* acts, in Classical and Qur'anic Arabics it was a single letter but in MSA it was split to two letters, but people in Egypt still use the older Classical version!
- the feminine suffix is pronounce /-ah/ in Classical but most drop the /h/, as for Levantine /-a/ is preserved next to pharyngealized consonants, uvulars, and glottals including /h/ like /ʒiha/ "direction", /ʒabha/ "forehead", /nakha/ "flavour", and /mintibha/ "she is paying attention".
- VSO is SUPER common in informal and casual speech, for example /ʔakal lwalad ħumˤmˤusˤ/ "ate the boy hummus" is not ungrammatical or particularly rare or formal
- All numbers except 1 and 2 usually enter a construct structure when modifying a noun, the reason 1 and 2 don't participate is because you use the singular and dual to tell the number of a noun, but you can emphasize numbers by putting them after the noun as an adjective rather than a construct structure, so /tlat tiffaːħaːt/ "three apples" but also /tiffaːħaːt tlaːte/ "THREE apples"
- *ǧim* was /g/ in Old Arabic not Classical Arabic, the Classical pronunciation was /ɟ/. also some people dialectally do geminate *ǧim* North Levantine /ʒʒisᵊr/ rather than /lʒisᵊr/ isn't uncommon.

There's a lot I could add but this is a long comment already so let's end it with me as a native speaker of Urban North Levantine saying your examples sentences:
/bidna nʕuːd lalʔabraːʒ bukra/
[ˈbɪdnæ nʕuːd lælʔæbˈrˤɑːʒ ˈbʊkrˤɑ]
I personally prefer saying /nirʒaʕ/ instead of /nʕuːd/ but that's just an idiolectal difference

/lʔusuːd ʔatˤtˤaʕit halkaʕke laʔarbaʕ ʔitˤaʕ/
[lʔʊˈsuːd ˈʔɑtˤtˤɑʕɪt hælˈkæʕke læˈʔærbæʕ ˈʔɪtˤɑʕ]
weird sentence! btw you can use the plural masculine conjugation with lions, the rule about using the feminine singular for non-human plurals is a Classical/MSA rule that rarely applies to modern dialectal speach, and even in Classical/MSA they are examples of non-human plurals getting plural agreement especially to humanize the non-humans or give them more agency (similar to how you're supposed to call a dog "it" in English but a lot of people don't!), it's also especially common in poetry for poetic and metric reasons.

[martinomasolo]

Classical Arabic was not only based on old Hejazi (the Arabic of the Quran) but on a sort of koiné of dialects already in use before for example in pre-Islamic arabic poetry!

[lyxthen]

Huh! Surprised this doesn't have more views. My boyfriend is Egyptian and I'm trying to learn the language (without much success, if I am being honest), but this is a very interesting video, even though I'm not yet at a point where I understand most of it.

[Atlantjan]

In Maltese, like in Arabic, the plural miksur (broken plural) nonsense is not just a reality as well, but it's fairly common for female nouns too. But the worst thing is that even though the archipelago is basically the size of a medium sized city, depending on where you are many plurals are broken differently. It's insanity.

[ibrahimx]

Yup I speak arabic, and yeah I kinda suffered a bit with MSA grammer in school, it is extra complected for sure, and while the dialects aren't much easier, I like to think they're a bit simpler and easier to learn to foreigners since in levantine we have almost a (to be) verb.
My dialect is also kinda levantine but I don't wanna discourage you but there's dialects within the dialects within the dialects 🤣
Each city and town has almost it's own dialect, you can basically know someone's origin using the way he speaks here in syria and we're only 20 million something!
It was a good video and I can tell it was exhausting great job ma dude, the pronunciation is good but you tend to stress stuff a bit, yeah hope studying arabic wasn't that insufferable 🤣🤣🤣
Cheers from crumbling Damascus 🥂🥂

[climatechangeisrealyoubast]

I’m really impressed by the depth of this vid and ur pronounciation. I still struggle with it a bit cuz arabs often will try teaching u fusHa instead of their dialect. Also because of all the consonant shenanigans I completely forgot the vowels when I learnt the pronounciation.
Funny things that I basically only studied some of the pronounciation of levantive arabic and then started studying Turkish which I’m now semi proficient in instead of arabic.
Fun stuff 👍🏻

[PaleoalexPicturesLtd]

The speculation about the disparition of emphatic/pharyngialised consonants does not deal with what would happen when those consonants close a syllable ! In this position they still would very much be necessary since they have no consistent effect on a following consonant.

[Fottrel]

i was laying in bed last night thinking about how cool abjads were and thinking about learning more about arabic. this is a miracle. great video! subscribed

[XFlashSofts]

I think you can switch the SVO structure around, for example:
أنا بحكي عربي
انا العربي بحكيها
العربي انا بحكيها
بحكي أنا العربي
بحكي العربي أنا
العربي بحكيها أنا

all of them translate to: I speak arabic
but the most used one is the SVO, but it would not feel weird if I heard the other forms.

[BakerVS]

Wow. I know my way around the big Indo-European languages (English, German, French, Italian, Russian), but Arabic seems EXTREMELY complicated, at least in first impression!

Nice video!

[manetho]

فعلا لما الشخص بيبقى بيتكلم اللغة كلغته الأم مبياخدش باله من كم القواعد الكتيرة و المعقدة الي هو بيستخدمها و هو بيتكلم، أنا متحدث باللغة العربية و مكنتش عارف إني بعمل كل القواعد و الأنظمة دي و أنا بتكلم، بس على العموم فيديو عظيم و نطقك للهجة الشامية جميل جدا، تحياتي من جمهورية مصر أم الدنيا🇪🇬

[belalabusultan]

ah yes, squeeze the first 9 years of school education of Arabic language int 1 video, and add the extra spice of including dialect studies (which is never taught in Arabic schools actually).

[casualmajestic]

What an astonishing video. I’m very impressed, thanks!

[LamDaSky]

FYI it’s mostly northern Levantine that shifted “th” (both ث and ذ) to “t”/“d” or “s”/“z” (especially “s”/“z”). In southern Levantine you can still very commonly hear “th” as in MSA. Also, qaf is not always pronounced as a glottal sound in southern Levantine, but also as a “g” (like in garden).

[Ibrahimss]

It was a great video, I enjoyed it, But I'd like to note that انكتب is never used to mean subscribe, You'd always hear اشترك used rather than انكتب

And I'd also like to talk about something interesting in my dialect, Najd Arabic, The old passive forms of verbs i. e كُسِر got replaced by the class 7 verbs i. e انكَسَر as a new passive form, But older people tend to keep the old passive forms.

[sergeychistov]

Underrated video. This is quality content!

[Algeriawindows]

9:49 the crown thing is call "al-shada" which makes the letter sound longer.
kinda like you say the letter two times.