User talk:M. I. Wright

Welcome

Hi, I think I noticed you on the Discord as well, but since nobody has done it yet I'll be the first to welcome you here on-wiki. Your contributions seem to be of good quality and in accordance with WT:Entry layout and so forth, so I'll spare you the ponderous {{welcome}} template. Keep up the good work! — Mnemosientje (t · c) 09:05, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

Thank you!! Glad to be here. M. I. Wright (talk) 18:13, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

Yes, welcome. Are you already acquainted with User:Fay Freak? He's our main Arabic contributor at the moment, and I'm sure he'll be happy to have a(nother, alongside User:Profes.I.) native/heritage speaker to talk to. Canonicalization (talk) 21:12, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Aha, I've talked with him once or twice but I haven't gotten particularly acquainted with Wiktionary's Arabic contributor-base yet. Thank you too for the welcome! M. I. Wright (talk) 20:20, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Your note

These pharyngeal pronunciations are basically obsolete rather than just archaic. You might still hear them in some rural villages, but that doesn't mean they aren't archaic. They are on their way out and quickly. But would you please tell me some of my uninformed assertions (or whatever you called it) about North Levantine Arabic? Thank you. 178.4.151.74 18:39, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

I mean, if you find a source that claims that the pharnygeal pronunciation is stable among younger speakers in a particular area of, say, Gozo. We can change it to "dialectal". My position, based on sources as well as personal experience, is that "archaic" is the best way to put it, but the point is that it must be made clear that this pharyngealisation is in no way part of contemporary standard Maltese. That's all really. (I'd still like to hear about those uninformed assertions, please.) 178.4.151.74 18:53, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

@178.4.151.74 (if pings work on IPs), thank you. Again, I don't know Maltese, so I wasn't questioning your authority on it ⁠— just making sure that the "archaic" thing wasn't opinion and was actually sourceable. Anyway, regarding North Levantine, I've been assuming that you're User:Kolmiel based on your IPs' contribution histories ⁠— if not, then ignore me here! But why not a list:

I'd prefer not to answer that ;) 178.4.151.74 08:21, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

• The ones that give me the most grief are the spelling of ة as ـه and then the transcription of it as -i. Regarding spelling, this isn't me pushing some kind of MSA-purism ⁠— it's that ـه is literally just not a conventional spelling of it among North Levantine speakers, unlike in Egyptian Arabic or similar. It gets particularly bad when this makes its way into a page title, like at صبيه. And regarding transcription, the -i is problematic because (1) it suggests raising all the way up to /i/, which only exists as a minority feature, and (2) it suggests homophony with ـي, which again is a minority case and should not be treated as a standard of transcription. My own dialect merges them both to /e/ (which might actually be [e̞] or [ɪ] or something, I have yet to properly map out my vowel space), but this is a markedly regional feature even just within Lebanon ⁠— let alone Syria, which "North Levantine" also encompasses. The conventional transcription of ة, both from native speakers and from academic sources like Cowell and Brustad, is ⟨e⟩.

Matter of taste. I transcribed it "-i" because of the merger. They can be merged into [ɪ]~[i] as well as [e], as you say, but both are mergers. If this merger is so "markedly regional" as you claim (?), then "-e" is certainly preferable; I can't say much about the situation in Syria. However, I don't think this transcription suggests anything about the actual realisation. 178.4.151.74 08:02, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Hmm. I think the merger(s) is/are a bit more advanced within Lebanon than in Syria, although I talk to people from northern Lebanon regularly who seem not to exhibit anything of the sort (Lebanese people conveniently prefer to chat in Franko/Arabizi/whatever you call it, which obfuscates some things but at least helps make the -e/-i difference clear: "3ajbetni 7elwe", for example.) There's little to no merging in most of Syria from what I can tell, and either way a transcribed -i does still evoke /i/, although I get your reasoning (and I'm relieved to know what it was actually intended to represent). I don't know here. I'd personally prefer to find a single symbol that incorporates the /a/ pronunciation, too — ⟨ǽ⟩ seems cute and potentially workable, but obviously readability has to be taken into account as well. M. I. Wright (talk) 11:00, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

• Similarly, the standard spelling of /ʔ/ < */q/ in words that are still clearly connectable to MSA is ق, not أ, and I have no idea where the assumption comes from that the latter is always the dictionary form and the former only an "etymological spelling". For example, وأت is by no possible measure an actually-used spelling of وقت, which is in fact the lemma with the former being an alternative spelling. You can verify this kind of thing super easily using just Google: "هلأ الوأت" (with quotes) returns like 8 results, while "هلأ الوقت" returns an estimated ~5,700; "بدو أهوة" returns 6 results, "بدو أهوه" returns 4, and "بدو قهوة" returns an estimated ~3,200.

I agree with this and I've myself changed lemmas to the qaf form on more than one occasion. The point in favour of using alif would be making the spelling more phonetic, but I agree that it's too rare in practice to be useful. 178.4.151.74 08:02, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

• • Notice the qualifier at the start, "words that are still clearly connectable to MSA". The spellings هلأ and, at least in Lebanon, "بِعَئِّد" are commonplace ⁠— the former being standard because the connection to هالوقت is obviously a bit obfuscated, and the latter acceptable because "bi3a22id" is seen as a thoroughly colloquial expression.
  • On that note, what actually is used (or, at least, used more than أ) is ئـ — there's a Google result with something like ئومي اعملي ئهوة, for instance, and in general spelling these words with ئـ gets you results numbering in the low hundreds. Personally, these spellings hurt my eyes, but since they do have some currency I don't see much wrong with putting them down as alternative spellings... but again, these are the alternative forms, not the conventional spellings.

Sure. I've also come across سقل for "to ask". 178.4.151.74 08:02, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Nice. M. I. Wright (talk) 11:00, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

• I'm not sure if this next one's from an assumption that Lebanon-and-sometimes-urban-Syria accounts for all or most of North Levantine, or if it's just accidental, but what's up with transcribing ـا (ā) as ⟨ē⟩ half the time...?

I've been using "ē" because the fronted pronunciation is not always predictable. Of course, I see the problem with the central pronunciation in parts of Syria. The best might be to use both alongside. 178.4.151.74 08:02, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Personally, I'd prefer to stick with ⟨ā⟩ 100% of the time to avoid this exact headache of "not always predictable," and boy is it a headache. It should be OK if Romanization represents morphology more than pronunciation, because we (eventually probably hopefully will) have IPA to serve the latter purpose. M. I. Wright (talk) 11:00, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

• Sometimes there are strange assertions based on incomplete vocabulary knowledge. For example, صبيان had the whole explanation about being only a plural of those unrelated terms without once mentioning that it's also the regular ol' plural of صبي (ṣabi) (which, yes, exists!), and اخت had a whole thing about a "somewhat confusing paradigm where [the terms are reversed]" without mentioning that there's also a normal, less-objectionable plural إخوات. Various body-part terms had odd/incomplete descriptions of the plural–dual paradigm, even though it's literally just that the old duals were repurposed as the now-standard plurals and the new duals are with ة (-t-). And the page for عم had a pretty oversimplified and/or region-centric description of the variation between the two verb forms.

I didn't say ṣabi didn't exist. And I certainly didn't mean it either. All I did was to add the specific dialectal use as an all-purpose masculine form. I don't know why I didn't mention it, but at any rate it wasn't the context in which I was working then, which was the field of ibn, bint, walad, šabb and their respective gender implications. I had added ṣibyān in the plural sections, so I just created the link to make the connection between the singulars, I guess. As for اخوات, I've only consciously heard it in construct forms, and as far as I can tell often meaning "siblings". You get things like iḵwātak l-banāt vs. iḵwātak š-šabāb, don't you? I do think that ḵayy > iḵwi vs. uḵt > ḵayyāt is at least not an uncommon paradigm and as such it may be confusing to some. As to the duals, it's your assertion that speakers make absolute no connection between عينين and dual. But I did say that they were widely interchangeable rather than dual-plural pairs. You only strengthened the statement to them being perfectly interchangeable, which may be true. 178.4.151.74 08:02, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks ⁠— I was just perplexed that it was skipped over, but it's reassuring to know it's not that it was assumed not to exist. And yeah, both إخوة and إخوات are usable for "siblings", which can sometimes result in needing to specify like you show, but I feel(?) like each one still keeps some connotation of gender... anyway, you're right that the plural thing is still a curious asymmetry, and I did leave in the descriptions of it. Regarding the duals: the one that it's hardest to tell with is عينين, but I'm only saying so because عيون dominates in Lebanon, meaning the former seems more-readily interpretable with some kind of sub-plural meaning. I think it's easier to tell with universal ones like إجرين, where e.g. النملة إلها ست إجرين (n-namle ʾila sitt ʾijrēn) is completely unremarkable, and similar examples like حمار بأربع دينين (ḥmār b-ʾarbaʿ daynēn, an insult) abound; the actual dual only surfaces with ة (-t-), as in إجرتين and so on. M. I. Wright (talk) 11:00, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

• • These ones I'm not quite agonizing over, because "incomplete vocabulary knowledge" is not something to fault an L2 speaker for. But, like with the other list items here, the confidence in recording incomplete/inaccurate info as complete truth was what prompted me to want to verify the Maltese thing.
• The most-egregious example of the above was at ل, where the usage note was originally a triple-whammy, first asserting that the stem for suffixation is إلّـ (ʾill-) and then that "[the phenomenon of ل being attached directly to the verb] is also the reason for the [reduplicated forms لإلّـ (laʾill-)] because the simple forms are identical to suffixed verb forms of قال (ʾāl, “to say, tell”), such as قللي (ʾil-li, “tell me”)."
  • I assume the very first assumption, that suffixes are attached to the stem إلّـ (ʾill-), is based off of its appearance as ـلّـ (-ill-) when suffixed to a verb. This is a non-sequitur and the resulting assumption is false: the stem is إلـ (ʾil-), not *إلّـ (*ʾill-). Checking in with any source at all ⁠— for example, Cowell again ⁠— would've cleared this up immediately.
  • Even if the stem were *إلّـ (*ʾill-), the reduplicated form wouldn't solve anything... it'd proceed to be homophonous with لقلّلـ (laʾill-), a completely common way of saying "I should tell [obj]" or "let me tell [obj]". Were there ambiguity in the first place, it'd instead have to be resolved by ditching the ل altogether (most likely in favor of عند).

Just this: I didn't say "the phenomenon of it being attached directly to the verb is the reason for the reduplication". I said that the non-attached forms may be reduplicated because they could otherwise sound the same as forms of قال + ل. Now, if it's really always ilak, not illak, then this is admittedly a mistake and I thank for you mentioning it to me. I've always said it la’illak. Never been corrected for it, but okay, probably out of politeness. 178.4.151.74 08:02, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Well, I did find this one page with quite-precise transliteration that records illak rather than ilak. I've never heard the geminated form in speech, and I haven't been able to find it attested anywhere except that one page, but maybe it exists as a minority pronunciation and you happened to pick it up. If you have any native speakers on hand who could verify illak, then yeah, that'd absolutely be something Wiktionary should record. M. I. Wright (talk) 11:00, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

• • Speaking of عند, we also see it prefixed with ل to produce لعند. There's no supposed ambiguity motivating this one, indicating rather strongly that the reduplication above would be for other reasons.

Doesn't la‘and, la‘ind mean a direction? I'd say ija la‘andi bil-bayt. Can you also say: kān la‘andi bil-bayt?? 178.4.151.74 08:02, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

No way, your intuition's good here! I was talking the other way around: rūḥ ʿnd bayyak farjī ʿa hal-warʾa (for example) is synonymous with and presumably older than the la-ʿnd form. M. I. Wright (talk) 11:00, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

So I think I was justified in checking that the Maltese "archaic" was backable with sources and not just idiosyncratic preference. Again, though, if you're not Kolmiel, then none of that actually applies to you, so please pardon me here :P M. I. Wright (talk) 21:05, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

Oh, I just saw how stupidly worded the message I left on your talk page was. My bad — I think I wrote it right after I woke up. I was trying to make it sound friendly, but it ended up with that tone instead lol. M. I. Wright (talk) 23:37, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

You always have the right to question everything! But yes, your note was not particularly friendly for a first encounter. Apology accepted. But beyond this: Most of what you said wasn't even actual mistakes. The transcription and all that is a choice, a convention. And even the other stuff, as far you mentioned it, was essentially correct information, just perhaps lacking some addition or re-evaluation here and there. It's good that you can do this now. So far nobody could. The exception is, of course, the la'illak thing, for which I'm sorry. 178.4.151.74 08:02, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks so much. Honestly I've just been getting frustrated over the past month because there's no one to properly discuss these issues with (no North Levantine contributors, ofc), so this is just me finally getting it all out ahah. Now that I've managed to get my catharsis in, I do still want to thank you for the initiative in recording North Levantine stuff — it's a really good foundation. M. I. Wright (talk) 11:00, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

I do get it. You come to the project, you read وأت and some other strange stuff, and you think "why are they doing this?!". In the more worked-on languages, these things generally have been thoroughly discussed. But in that case for one, it was just a guy who thought: "If we do dialectal Arabic, let's make the lemmas as phonetic as possible". I do think that's the right approach per se, but within the limits of the respective spelling being at least fairly common. And in the case of qaf it isn't. Of course, a problem with abjads is that so many of the lemmas look the same. The standard Arabic entries are often very long already, even though they may not even contain all the words and definitions yet. Now imagine adding 12 Arabic dialects to that as well: the pronunciations are slightly different, some of the definitions are slightly different, but after all it will be extremely repetitive... But yeah, I suppose there's no good alternative.

Anyway. You can certainly be the boss of "apc" from now on. I've never really worked on it anyway. Just added things here and there when I felt like it. I often added example sentences, because it's useful mainly, but also for the fun of it. I didn't make up any strange stuff generally, but nevertheless some may be capable of being corrected or improved in terms of idiomatic-ness.

I don't want to have too much of the wiki community, that's why I'll continue as an IP. But I do give edit summaries and read edit summaries, and if there's something urgent you can write on my IP wall and I'll get to you. So long. 178.4.151.74 12:04, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks x1000 again for your time. Peace! M. I. Wright (talk) 04:24, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

Klēte realization of tlēte

I had sworn I heard a friend of mine pronounce it klēte too lol. I looked all over the place and couldn’t find a single published description of a kl- realization, but I did come across a few tweets ridiculing klēte-pronouncers 😢. Now I’m pretty certain in that case I simply misheard an alveolar lateral affricate as a laterally released velar (they sound super close, check it out!), but I don’t doubt that true velar realizations are out there. Anyways, I really appreciate all the work you’re doing and I look forward to being able to contribute once school slows down. A comprehensive North Levantine section and a proper transliteration system for dialectal Arabic are in Wiktionary’s future! Rhemmiel (talk) 02:18, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

Oh, thanks for clarifying! My edit summary there was a bit harsh, apologies. And yeah, it can be hard to tell apart the lateral pronunciation from a true [k] -- shame that the latter doesn't seem to be attested academically. But I look forward to your contributions, and I can't wait to see what Arabic on Wiktionary will look like soon :) M. I. Wright (talk) 01:01, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Help:IPA/Lebanese Arabic

Hey, I've just finished creating the article for Help:IPA/Lebanese Arabic over on the English wiki. Just wanted to ask if it's accurate enough (I've also included some notes). I've taken the info from Lebanese Arabic and Levantine Arabic phonology, so if there is anything inaccurate feel free to change it. Also, if you know other people who have enough knowledge on Lebanese Arabic, please ping them so that they could also give their input. Thanks, Nehme1499 (talk) 22:35, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

@Nehme1499: Thank you!! I forgot to respond on Wikipedia because I was on a short break at the time. The only noticeable problem I see is the note about the glottal stop, but other than that I'll just make some minor edits -- good work. (Sadly, there aren't any other speakers from Lebanon/the Levant who are active here on Wiktionary!) —M. I. Wright (talk, contribs) 00:15, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

لوط

Hello, M. I. Wright (talk • contribs)! Thanks for cleaning up and further resolving the ambiguity regarding the different narratives of the Abrahamic figure. It is true that both the Islamic and the Biblical figure are referred to as لوط in Arabic. However, the extent to which each of them is attested significantly varies. So, although the current description is plausible, I think that a note of this varying usage should ideally be given. Assem khidhr (talk) 09:49, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

@Assem khidhr: That sounds fine to me! Feel free to add a usage-notes section to clear that up. I just wanted to make sure that the entry did acknowledge both figures in some way or another. —M. I. Wright (talk, contribs) 19:56, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Levantine Arabic Auto-Conjugation Template

Hey, I posted about this in the general discussion forum and you seem to be a POI w/ re: to Arabic on Wiktionary.

Basically, I wanted to get conjugation tables set up for South Levantine Arabic. I know your background is in North Levantine Arabic, but I think that's fine. Ultimately, I think it's really important to have some visibility on the site for non-MSA conjugations (i.e. with the B-prefixes, etc.) in general. I teach SL Arabic and I've noticed that there's a lack of reference tools for عامية conjugations, so it would be invaluable to have something of the sort on Wiktionary.

Someone commented on my post saying that the issue is also that entries would have to be made for SL Arabic to begin with. That's actually the easy part, for me. That is, the obstacle for me right now is my lack of knowledge of Wikimedia coding that would enable me to produce the conjugation tables in question; whereas creating entries seems straightforward. (If I haven't mentioned this, I've only just made a Wikimedia account last week, although I use Wiktionary on a daily basis.) Anyway, as part of my job teaching Arabic I've already created "low-tech" conjugation charts on Excel, so in my inexperienced impression it should just be a matter of translating that into code (?). It seems you're already working on something like that, so please let me know if we can work together to make it happen.

Thank you so much. I really hope there's a way to get this content on the site. AdrianAbdulBaha (talk) 12:58, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

@AdrianAbdulBaha Hi! Sorry I never responded. I don't come here anymore except to correct stuff, because I don't personally feel that Wiktionary is a good platform for creating new documentation of languages (from a technical standpoint, not a community-/people-related one). Not faulting you at all if you feel differently about it, though -- I did catch your video on your project here, and the effort you've put in is really commendable! Glad you were able to get it to work out. —M. I. Wright (talk, contribs) 09:37, 14 February 2021 (UTC)