How do you spell relief?

[kitchen_kink]

I find I can't even think about this conflict between Israel and Hezbollah without wanting to cry, scream or tear my hair out. Or all of those things. Perhaps also rip W a new one. But what else is new.

The only think I've been able to focus on is the disparate panoply of pronunciations for one of the key players in this war. In fact, thinking about that keeps me just a little bit sane during the continuous barrage of news from NPR and the BBC.

So, forgive me if this seems flippant. But seriously:

[Poll #784507]

Comments

something else

[cos]

The genuine pronounciation is the one that sounds like "chizb allah" more or less (that's the closest I can get with English spelling). "chizb" is Arabic for "party", Allah of course is God, their name simply means "party of God".

If you listen on the radio, you can sometimes hear Israelis or Lebanese say it. Their pronounciation is the right one, more or less. But it's not the standard westernized pronounciation. If you want that, you'll have to choose your authority, such as the BBC.

[beowabbit]

Here’s a bit of a mailing-list archive that talks about the issue. Of particular interest is this message there.

In short, (1) there’s a lot of regional variation in vowel quality (and other things) across Arabic dialects, and (2) the vowels of Arabic don’t map well onto Western European or English vowels anyway.

Arabic has three vowels, each of which comes in a long and a short form. There’s a high-back-round vowel which can be equally well transliterated “o” or “u”, a high-front-unround vowel which can be transliterated “i” or “e”, and a low vowel which is transliterated “a” but has a lot of variation in it.

This means that (for instance) there’s no distinction in Arabic between “i” and “e” that carries meaning. Some of the variation in exactly how the sound is pronounced is completely free, some of it has to do with the particular dialect, and a lot of it has to do with surrounding sounds.

(As an example of free variation in English, some speakers pronounce “th” as in “thin” with the tongue between the top and bottom teeth. Some speakers pronounce it with the tongue behind the top teeth. As an example of variation depending on surrounding sounds, in English the sounds “t”, “p”, and “k” are always followed by a puff of breath called aspiration at the beginning of a stressed syllable, unless they are preceded by an “s” sound. You can feel this if you hold your hand right in front of your mouth while you say “top” and “stop”, or “kin” and “skin”.)