Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 November 6

= November 6 =

Arabic alphabet

 * 1) Why did gimel (with the hard g sound) end up with the j sound consistently in Arabic??
 * 2) Why did Arabic re-order the letters from their original Semitic order??

Georgia guy (talk) 20:04, 6 November 2019 (UTC)


 * The answer to your question #1 likely has no answer; as was explained before when you asked similar questions, language change is essentially arbitrary. Languages do change, but they often change in ways that don't have causes.  See this video here, at about the 3 minute mark, where a languages and dialects expert explains that we don't know why languages change in a particular manner.  The changes can be tracked after the fact, but there is no predictive manner to explain why a language will change in a specific manner.  If we could explain why Arabic had that particular sound change, we could also use that explanation to predict similar sound changes in all other languages; and it doesn't work that way.  Other historical sound changes are not broadly applicable across languages in ways that let us explain the "why" answer: the Great vowel shift is unique to English.  It happened, it was systematic, but it did not happen in a way that we can explain why.  Grimm's law is unique to proto-Germanic.  It happened, it was systematic, but it did not happen in a way that we can explain why.  Language change is not predictable, though it is analyzable and often systematic (that is, a particular sound change often propagates through an entire language in a repeatable manner; but there's no real cause for it). The answer to your second question has some information at the Wikipedia article Arabic alphabet, in the section titled "Alphabetical order"  -- Jayron 32 20:56, 6 November 2019 (UTC)


 * One possible cause would be if somebody influential started saying it that way, and others emulated that person. SinisterLefty (talk) 21:41, 6 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Where did you read or hear that? Can you provide us your reference so we can read more about it ourselves?-- Jayron 32 23:35, 6 November 2019 (UTC)
 * An example of this being wrongly thought to have happened is the so-called Castillian lisp. While that instance has been shown to be false, it doesn't seem implausible that something like it has happened elsewhere and -when (and I too would be interested to learn of actual examples). The accent used by the British royal family, particularly in the earlier half of the 20th Century, was noticeably odd by general British English standards (even so-called Received pronunciation), and some people deliberately emulated it. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.122.179.237 (talk) 00:01, 7 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Thanks for that. The modern general term would be an opinion leader. In this case, the opinion in question is the "correct" way to pronounce things. (Our article seems a bit too focused on the modern media, though, as opinions have historically been spread in other ways, such as via public speaking or even one-on-one.) SinisterLefty (talk) 02:41, 7 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Georgia guy -- not all dialects pronounce ج as [dʒ] (in fact, [dʒ] is more the tajwid/MSA pronunciation than the most widespread pronunciation). Egyptian Arabic dialect famously pronounces  ج as [ɡ], while most Levantine dialects pronounce it as [ʒ], and there are yet further variations in Gulf dialects.  The early medieval Arabic pronunciation was probably [Ɉ] (palatal voiced stop -- not an affricate).
 * As for the letter orders, you can look at articles Nabatean alphabet and Abjad numerals. The Arabic alphabet was different from its Aramaic source, in that only 21 of the 22 Aramaic letters were borrowed into Arabic -- the Aramaic letter semkat ס (Hebrew samekh) was not borrowed.  Later, these 21 letters were expanded to 28 by the use of dotting (dotting also being used to disambiguate letters that had become similar in shape).  There were attempts to arrange these 28 letters in the traditional North Semitic 22-letter alphabet order (with 6 left over at the end, of course) -- these were the abjads.   But ultimately grouping letters of similar shapes together was found to be more practical for collation purposes... AnonMoos (talk) 08:51, 7 November 2019 (UTC)


 * By the way, something that annoys me about Arabic Wikipedia is that they often transcribe names with the Latin alphabet letter "J" automatically into Arabic as ج based on English, even if the English pronunciation is not really useful or relevant to that particular name. Famke Jansen appears on Arabic Wikipedia as فامك جانسن, even though her name is not pronounced with [dʒ] or anything like it in the original Dutch.  And just now, I've discovered that Joshua Blau is جوشوا بلاو , where جوشوا isn't the normal version of the name "Joshua" in Arabic, or any kind of adaptation of his original Hebrew name "Yehoshua", but instead is just a dumb mechanical transposition of the English pronunciation of his name into Arabic... AnonMoos (talk) 05:15, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

Any thoughts on an FAQ??
I have moved this question to the ref desk talk page, which is the correct place for it. --Viennese Waltz 08:53, 8 November 2019 (UTC)