Talk:هنه
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I've been cleaning up after User:Kolmiel's North Levantine entries lately. (He hasn't logged into his account for a while, but it seems he has a number of IPs with more-recent activity.) While I sincerely appreciate his initiative in recording and creating pages for Levantine lemmas, it seems he operated under a number of misconceptions and/or false extrapolations, two of which in particular are relevant here:
- His preferred spelling of Arabic ـَة (-a) in North Levantine is ـَه (-ah), which is rather idiosyncratic. The dotless form is the conventional spelling in Egypt, but not so in the Levant.
- Whatever its Arabic-script spelling, his preferred transcription of this morpheme in North Levantine is -i. This is problematic: firstly, it suggests raising up to /i/ in speech (which is false on a general level: it exists, but is highly regional and much, much rarer than the standard raising to /e/), and secondly it suggests homophony between this feminine suffix and between ـِي (-i), an unrelated ending. The two are not homophonous for a majority of North Levantine speakers.
So with #1 out of the way, we end up with هنة. The problem now is that, as far as my knowledge goes (being a heritage speaker and in communication with native speakers regularly), this still isn't the conventional spelling — it's هني. Google proves this well enough: it estimates some 24,000 results in a search for "هني عم", but a relatively-paltry 2,000 in a search for "هنة عم" (and these are reliably North Levantine numbers, because the عم is a present-progressive marker characteristic of Levantine, and the -n- 3pl pronoun is characteristic of North Levantine). Additionally, because Google does not distinguish ة from ه, that 2,000 number is for both هنة and هنه together — the individual count for each spelling is going to be even lower. But this is where #2 comes in: if one thinks that ـة (or by extension ـه) is pronounced -i, then it might mistakenly seem correct to use it to spell هني.
If this RFD goes through, then the obvious move is to relocate the page to هني, and I don't believe that هنه should get to stick around as an "alternative form of".
(Interestingly, there actually is a confounding factor: Mark Cowell's A Reference Grammar of Syrian Arabic, which does not use the Arabic script but faithfully & consistently transcribes ـَة as -e and ـِي as -i, renders this pronoun as hinne. With this in mind, a case could potentially be made for the page's current spelling: ـه has precedent as a "filler" for an -e vowel that otherwise cannot be accurately represented by the Arabic script, as seen in إيه (ʾē) and ليه (lē). However, we can safely say that this didn't and shouldn't factor into the chosen spelling, because (1) the transliteration Kolmiel gives is hinni, not hinne, and (2) the facts of usage & the Google search-result estimates obliterate any logical what-ifs we can propose here. And I don't know of many other reliable North Levantine sources to compare to, as my only other one is Dr. Kristin Brustad's The Syntax of Spoken Arabic, which does use the Arabic script... but her Syrian data comes solely from a speaker who uses the form hinnin, so we don't get to see how she'd spell the vowel-final pronoun. If someone procures a couple reliable references that justifiably use هنة or هنه, I'll revise my stance here.) M. I. Wright (talk) 09:16, 17 November 2019 (UTC)