Classical Arabic has 28
consonantal phonemes, including two semi-vowels,
originally corresponding to the 28 letters of the
Arabic alphabet. However, by the 8th century the
letter
alif
no longer represented a glottal stop,
but a long
[a:].
As a result, a
diacritic symbol,
hamza,
was introduced to represent this sound. In addition,
some of these phonemes have coalesced in the various
modern dialects, while new phonemes have been
introduced through borrowing or phonemic splits.
Arabic has six
vowel phonemes (three short vowels and three long
vowels); they appear as various allophones,
depending on the preceding consonant. Short vowels
are not usually represented in written language,
although they may be indicated with diacritics.
Note that Arabic is particularly rich in
uvular, pharyngeal, and
pharyngealized ("emphatic")
sounds. The emphatic sounds are generally considered
to be
ṣ,
ḍ,
ṭ, and
ẓ. Sometimes
q is wrongly included — wrongly, because only
the four emphatics, and not
q, cause assimilation of emphasis to an
adjacent non-emphatic consonant.
It is generally
believed that Classical Arabic phonology is
extremely conservative, and is close to that of
Proto-Semitic;
only the South Arabian languages
are more conservative in their phonology. The six
vowels are inherited without change from
Proto-Semitic, and of the 29 Proto-Semitic
consonants, only one has been lost (/ʃ/,
which merged with
/s/).
In addition, various sounds have been changed. An
original
voiceless
lateral fricative
/ɬ/
became
/ʃ/,
restoring a previously lost sound. Another complex
lateral sound,
/ɮˁ/
(voiced pharyngealized lateral fricative), became
/dˁ/
with loss of the lateral sound, although the
original sound appears to have still existed at the
time of the Qur'an. (Hence the Classical appellation
'luġatu
l-ḍād' or "language of the
ḍād" for Arabic, where 'ḍād'
is the letter corresponding to this sound, which was
considered by Arabs to be the most unusual sound in
Arabic.) An original
/p/
became
/f/,
and
/ɡ/
became palatalized
/ɡʲ/
at the time of the Qur'an, and
/ʤ/
in the standard modern pronunciation of Classical
Arabic. (The dialects variously have
/ʤ/
(Arabian Peninsula),
/ɡ/
(Cairo),
/ʒ/
(North Africa),
/j/
(Persian Gulf area), and original
/ɡʲ/
(a few isolated pockets here and there).) Other
changes may have occurred as well, especially in the
emphatic consonants, depending on how Proto-Semitic
is
reconstructed.
The
syllable
structure of Arabic is such that there may be
clusters of two, but not of three consecutive
consonants. A cluster of two consonants at the
beginning of an utterance will be preceded by an
auxiliary vowel (alif
al-waṣl).
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