I do not think we can definitively say OB pronounciation is /awka/
Yes we can. Because all the manuscripts (before Aryan's invention) with Arabic transliteration of the word had it that way. Even the Greeks have it with "K"
The contention of Aryan was with the letter "B" to be pronounces as "v" instead of "w".
one generation pronounced it /evkee/ way and their children in the same region pronounced it another way /evshee/. All I can say for sure is that in the current grammatical and standardized Bohairic Coptic (GB), it is only pronounced /evshee/
This is a possibility that ONLY exist if the language is a live language. However what we have here is a personal preference that keep changing GB.
Aryan invented it to be evki and was taught that way. Only Ibrahim Ayad pronounce it evshee. M Mikhail and his immediate disciples pronounce it evki. So, who are those children you are referring to?
Please, present a standard definition of any language.
There isn't a single uniformally, officially agreed textbook on OB anywhere. Nor will there be because you keep grouping all variants of OB into one scheme or definition.
Standard definition of any language: Open a text book. It's the one that is taught.
I do not think we can definitively say OB pronounciation is /awka/
Yes we can. Because all the manuscripts (before Aryan's invention) with Arabic transliteration of the word had it that way. Even the Greeks have it with "K"
The contention of Aryan was with the letter "B" to be pronounces as "v" instead of "w".
And yet you avoided explaining OB's pronunciation of awashe.
Standard definition of any language: Open a text book. It's the one that is taught.
That's what puts me off putting lots of effort into Coptic I guess. There are two variants being taught, and here on tasbeha.org it seems that there are variants of those variants.
I am learning Latin at the moment and although I am well aware that there are also variants there based on time and geography I get the sense that I am not in the middle of an argument about authenticity. So this makes me more comfortable spending time on study.
one generation pronounced it /evkee/ way and their children in the same region pronounced it another way /evshee/. All I can say for sure is that in the current grammatical and standardized Bohairic Coptic (GB), it is only pronounced /evshee/
This is a possibility that ONLY exist if the language is a live language. However what we have here is a personal preference that keep changing GB.
Aryan invented it to be evki and was taught that way. Only Ibrahim Ayad pronounce it evshee. M Mikhail and his immediate disciples pronounce it evki. So, who are those children you are referring to?
By your own logic, you're proving that GB is alive. If GB is pronounced today 100% like Aryan Moftah said, it would be a static dead language. And since you acknowledge that it changes, which corroborates my philosophy on variant classification, then one must only conclude is not as dead as you make it out to be.
Define evidence and then presented it. My definition of evidence is the manuscripts that existed before Mr. Aryan's invention.
What evidence are you looking for? That GB existed before Aryan? I already said it didn't. That a newly created language can be considered as authentic as a slowly changing language? I already talked about modern Hebrew That GB must exist in manuscripts to be real? Then Cairene Arabic must be fake. That GB is unfake? Go to church. It's the only think you'll hear in 99.99999999999999% of Coptic churches.
This is silly. If your preference is for OB, fine. But don't tell people here that OB is scientificlly better than GB.
And yet you avoided explaining OB's pronunciation of awashe.
No I did not. Awashy is not a Coptic word. What we are discussing is the Coptic word "awka" in OB and "evki" in GB. Two different words: awashy is an Arabic word of a Coptic one like when you apply the English word format in "farmat".
So, we are not discussing the application of Coptic words to Arabic but a pure Coptic word.
[quote author=Remnkemi link=topic=11113.msg135281#msg135281 date=1302023354] I'd like to get a little more specific. All languages have variations, as you said. What you are describing is a macro situation within a country. But each variation is localized within a geography or social setting.I was talking about variations within the specific geographical region or social setting.
Um...how is what you were talking about different than what I was talking about, then? Isn't a "variation localized within a geography" the same as "variations within a specific geographical region"? ???
Attic Greek is a variation of Greek as is Koine Greek. But did Greeks in the specific region and social setting where Attic Greek was localized have multiple pronunciations of a single word?
I don't know. I don't speak or understand any form of Greek.
The same with Arabic. Modern Standard Arabic has one and only one pronunciation of a word. It is the diglossic situation where we find alternate pronunciations in Cairene Arabic or Sahidic Arabic pronunciation of the same word.
Yes.
But now we have to look within Cairene Arabic, specifically. Does Cairene Arabic have multiple pronunciation for a single word? I don't think so. And of course, we have to get more specific. Some dialects (not usually Arabic) are localized to a neighborhood within a neighborhood.
Yeah, the specific "neighborhood dialects" or however you want to put it is more what I was talking about. These are subdialects of the national dialect, right? If I had to guess, they are distinguished primarily by their phonologies, which is how you get these slightly or not-so-slightly different pronunciations of words (as in Ophadece's English examples).
The specificity is needed to show how we distinguish and define a certain dialect or linguistic variation vs another. I may be wrong, but as far as I can tell, no one linguistic variation or dialect that is very specifically defined has multiple pronunciations for a single word.
What about the English examples provided by Ophadece?
It would seem that if multiple pronunciations for a single word exist, then language or dialect should be redefined where one pronunciation belongs to one dialect or one subdialect and the other pronunciation to another dialect or subdialect.
And that generally happens naturally. That's part of the process of dialect formation itself. But notice, the key here is "naturally"; the situation with Coptic is a little different since none of these variations within GB or OB have evolved naturally, and as such are more like individual variations. It is possible that subdialects could emerge from this situation, with the passage of time, but very unlikely unless one cantor's style predominates to the degree that it forms a school of pronunciation centered around that person. (e.g., if everyone learned under Mikhail el-Batanouni to the extent that they kept his pronunciation as closely as they could.)
When Radolph Kasser described his Coptic Singla for all the linguistic varieties (which he calls subdialects), he categorized each dialect by region (Boahiric, Sahidic, etc) and then sub-categorized variations by manuscript evidence of "alternate spellings (Bohairic vs. Bohairic 74!). One example is the word ouoh which in standard Bohairic, or Singlum B, is spelled (and pronunced) one way, while the same word in Singlum B74! is ouohe. Because there is a variation in spelling found in manuscripts, he gave it a new subdialect definition. I extended that philosophy to pronunciation. If there is multiple pronunciation for a single word, then it must be a different variation.
If I understand you correctly, I actually like your justification better than his, as there are certain problems with written Coptic that make going by written form alone somewhat problematic. My only reservation is that the pronunciation, no matter what variety, should vary in some regular and measurable way. The stability of a given dialect demands it. (There are, of course, a great deal of language use situations that are NOT stable and yet still may be spoken of as "dialects", "subdialects", or more precisely, "dialects in transition" or "emerging dialects".)
So Ophadece's example of negotiate, which can be pronounced /nego she yate/ and /nego se yate/ cannot belong to the same variation of English. And because English grammarians did not define such variations with a new subdialect, it doesn't mean Coptic is the same.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. Can you clarify?
Standard English is not concerned with variations. Bilingualists and code-mixing linguists are. And I believe such linguists would see Ophadece's examples as 2 different dialects or subdialects or variations, not one variation with 2 pronunciations.
Well, I am just one linguist (and not a very good one at that), but I would say that what we are looking at is the difference between the phonemic "target" and its phonetic realization. As such, I would classify them as variations on the same thing, and not necessarily as the basis for asserting a new dialect or subdialect (though such things may form part of the evidence for such an argument). Approximately:
It's not a big difference. It certainly isn't, by itself, comparable to the difference between, say, Egyptian Arabic and Lebanese Arabic, or Iberian Spanish and Cuban Spanish, or Nynorsk and Bokmal (two officially-recognized varieties of Norwegian).
As you said, Jeremy, this is a messy business. So what's the point of all of this? The point I was making is that OB cannot have 2 pronounciations for eu,y. Your only options is to give the "standard" OB one pronunciation, which I think is /awsha/ and classify another subdialect or variation for the other pronunciation /awka/ (say OB-2). The same is true with GB. The difference with GB is that there is only one way to pronounce eu,y: /evshee/ according to current trends in GB learning. The other pronunciation, /evkee/ is a hybrid between OB and GB, and it should get its own classification, say GB-2. This brings me back to a comment I made on a different thread: Both GB and OB have multiple schemes. Most studies are concerned with only one variation and neglect the possibility of multiple schemes, especially Fr Shenouda's thesis which was concerned with pre-19th century OB vs. post-19th century GB,
While I bow to your superior knowledge of Coptic specifically, I disagree with the general idea that you can't have such a situation. In brief, not only can you have such a situation because it already exists (remember, linguistics is not prescriptive, it is descriptive), you can have such a situation and not have to relegate any particular single variation to a "subdialect" (or whatever you want to call it) in the absence of stronger evidence that it belongs to such a cohesive variant. To use a different example that hopefully no one here will be invested in as we are in the OB/GB discussion, disinterested linguists generally recognize Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian as variations of the same language, rather than separate languages proper (as they are recognized in the individual states in which they are spoken). They do this by the means of determining the degree of lexical similarity between the languages concerned (this is expressed as a percent, and uses rather standard methodology involving a Swadesh list or something similar). If the results are above a certain percentage (I can't remember what it is at the moment; I think 80% or somewhere around that?), they are likely to be classified as dialects of the same language, no matter what the political and cultural situation demands they be called (e.g., Hindi-Urdu: When written in the Devanagari script by Hindus, it is called Hindi; when written in the Perso-Arabic script by Muslims, it is called Urdu). I wonder what the Swadesh list results would reveal about GB and OB? I am confident that they would show a incredibly high degree of similarity, as they are only phonologically distinguishable, and even then there are many examples in between the two or a blend of the two (as you yourself wrote about).
You were being facetious. But the more I look at this whole GB and OB argument, the more it seems like both variations (OB and GB) have run amok. Yet, there are many who are convinced that their preference is "scientifically proven". George
This is why I do not operate on preference alone. And at any rate, I would not say "scientifically proven" (science very rarely proves such things), rather "scientifically supported".
WOrds in Cairene Arabic are not all pronounced the same, the word 3adeya can be pronounced also as 3adya. The word yehres can be pronounced as yeharress. The word masalan can be matalan. Oujai
I can think of words in English which the same people would pronounce in different ways, considering both to be correct.
Off the top of my head..
I would pronounce scone as skon and skwn (short O and long O). Both are correct in my standard English.
Also digestive biscuit, is pronounced correctly in my standard English as d-i-jestif and d-e-jestif.
There are others. It may well be that in origin these pronounciations have different geographic origins but they have come to be accepted as equally correct within the English that I use.
Also I note that my own children, as they grow up, spontaneously use the form 'brang' of the verb bring. There SHOULD be such a form, but in standard English it is no longer correct.
I only mention this to suggest that it is not likely that there is ONE form of OB which is correct since it must always have been subject to various influences even as my own correct use of English is liable to. Correct English can have multiple pronounciations of the same word, and deprecated pronounciations of words that should perhaps exist according to rules but which do not according to the development of language.
Well said FR. Peter. @ jydeacon, FR. Shenouda was asked why he tolerates people less knowledgeable than him bashing him and sometimes cursing him, and he replied: "i am Christian and Christianity taught me to preach what is true ONLY" Oujai
[quote author=ophadece link=topic=11113.msg135314#msg135314 date=1302034856] WOrds in Cairene Arabic are not all pronounced the same, the word 3adeya can be pronounced also as 3adya. The word yehres can be pronounced as yeharress. The word masalan can be matalan. Oujai
Let me also answer Dzheremi's question also. He asked "Isn't a "variation localized within a geography" the same as "variations within a specific geographical region"?" What I was try to get at is one can assume that Cairene Arabic has multiple proununciation of a word, like mathalan: masalan and matalan. In this sense, Cairene Arabic is a variation localized within a geography (within Egypt and within the Middle East at large). But I would venture to guess that people who pronounce mathalan as masalan are probably more localized to a section of Cairo;localized geographically, or socially. And those who pronounce it as matalan are a different subsection of Cairo. This is what I meant by a variation within a variation. I don't have evidence to support this so I may be wrong. If I am right, then the premise that Cairene Arabic has multiple pronunciations for a single word is false. Since it's not really Cairene Arabic that has 2 pronunciation but separate (albeit very close) subsections of Cairene Arabic.
I will submit to Dzheremi's explanation of a Swadesh list. The variation between these two subsections of Cairene Arabic may not be enough to classify them as a full variant or dialect. This is a practical application of language definition. However, I was talking about linguistic theory. A difference does exist between variants, otherwise they would not be variants. If we choose to ignore the difference, then our definition of what constitues a language or a dialect is flawed. I guarantee any non-Bostonian will not know how to pronounce Worcester "correctly". I can simply ignore the fact that New England pronunciation is different and call it American English. According to my definition of American English, all non-New Englanders would not be speaking American Englsh. Logically, we should conclude that my definition of American English is wrong. This is not a great example because the difference between New-England American English and non-New England American English is greater than the differences between subsections of Cairene Arabic or variants within GB or OB.
But I would venture to guess that people who pronounce mathalan as masalan are probably more localized to a section of Cairo;localized geographically, or socially. And those who pronounce it as matalan are a different subsection of Cairo. This is what I meant by a variation within a variation. I don't have evidence to support this so I may be wrong.
Why present a personal opinion and then build a theory with no evidence then draw a conclusion? Would not that be confusing? It certainly is for me.
Well said FR. Peter. @ jydeacon, FR. Shenouda was asked why he tolerates people less knowledgeable than him bashing him and sometimes cursing him, and he replied: "i am Christian and Christianity taught me to preach what is true ONLY" Oujai
I'm not really sure why this is being directed at me. I didn't bash on Abouna Shenouda. If you guys want to believe OB is correct and GB is false then so be it. Thats not going to change anything. I think there are more pressing issues that the church must deal with than how to pronounce the word evki as awka or evki or pronunciation of a dead language. Is it sad that this happened? Yes absolutely, but its a fact. After how much work and time he has spent how many churches have switched to OB? None. So unless he gains complete support and just like there was a decree saying that GB is how words are pronounced for OB, these discussions that keep popping up of OB VS GB are pretty futile.
Let me also answer Dzheremi's question also. He asked "Isn't a "variation localized within a geography" the same as "variations within a specific geographical region"?" What I was try to get at is one can assume that Cairene Arabic has multiple proununciation of a word, like mathalan: masalan and matalan. In this sense, Cairene Arabic is a variation localized within a geography (within Egypt and within the Middle East at large). But I would venture to guess that people who pronounce mathalan as masalan are probably more localized to a section of Cairo;localized geographically, or socially. And those who pronounce it as matalan are a different subsection of Cairo. This is what I meant by a variation within a variation.
And this is what I meant in my reply when I wrote "subdialects of the national dialect". There is the national dialect, and then there are variations of that based on region (within the country), economic class, sex, etc. A really good book on this with reference to Egyptian Arabic specifically is Niloofar Haeri's "The Sociolinguistic Market in Cairo: Gender, Class and Education" (1997), which gives a good overview of the use of Arabic languages in Cairo, as broken down according to the indicated factors.
I don't have evidence to support this so I may be wrong. If I am right, then the premise that Cairene Arabic has multiple pronunciations for a single word is false. Since it's not really Cairene Arabic that has 2 pronunciation but separate (albeit very close) subsections of Cairene Arabic.
The line between "dialect" and any other form of language that might be used is notoriously hard to define. There is the concept of "communal dialects" which is relatively uncontroversial, as there are many famous books that attest to their existence as separate, stable norms (Haim Blanc's famous 1964 thesis "Communal Dialects of Baghdad", for instance), but these are within the larger national/regional variety, not some sort of aberration of it. To use an example from the aforementioned Blanc, Christian Arabic of Baghdad is a communal dialect within the larger milieu of Baghdadi Arabic, which is itself a prestige variety of the national variety of Iraqi Arabic, which is one of the recognizable variations of "Standard Arabic" (the internationally agreed upon entity that makes it possible for a Lebanese person to say that a Tunisian person is also speaking Arabic, even if they cannot necessarily understand each other perfectly). At no point in the chain from supranational to incredibly local varieties are they separate to the point of being different languages, even though the Arabic language is notorious for the high degree of diglossia exhibited among its speakers.
Given that in this conceptual model they operate more or less like tiers of a cake and not like inherently separate varieties, I would say that at any point along the continuum it is not possible to say with 100% conviction where one dialect ends and another begins. If you are dealing with such minute variations among Cairene speakers, then it seems to make more sense to me to note them for what they are: Variations among Cairene speakers. Maybe the variation of a particular suburb, or social group, or what have you, but still variations of Cairene if they do not mark the particular speakers as coming from another distinct region. This is no different than what is exhibited elsewhere. In Lebanon, for instance, there is commonly recognized "Jbeli" Arabic, referring to the very particular pronunciation of those from the Mt. Lebanon region, as opposed to, say, Beirut. It is still a variation of Lebanese Arabic, albeit a very distinct one.
I will submit to Dzheremi's explanation of a Swadesh list. The variation between these two subsections of Cairene Arabic may not be enough to classify them as a full variant or dialect. This is a practical application of language definition. However, I was talking about linguistic theory. A difference does exist between variants, otherwise they would not be variants. If we choose to ignore the difference, then our definition of what constitues a language or a dialect is flawed.
Who is ignoring the differences?
I guarantee any non-Bostonian will not know how to pronounce Worcester "correctly".
It is sort of like "Worster" (I had a good friend from Somerville who would go on and on with much pride about her region's unique speech). ;)
I can simply ignore the fact that New England pronunciation is different and call it American English.
And it is. New England English is a regional variety of American English.
According to my definition of American English, all non-New Englanders would not be speaking American English. Logically, we should conclude that my definition of American English is wrong.
Indeed, because it is backwards. Regional variations are precisely that: Variations on the standard. I think this is actually a better example than you might first realize, as the trouble in defining what is and what isn't "Standard American English" really does mirror the trouble in defining what is "correct" Coptic: Since no one can rightly claim to speak it natively, there is much debate on what exactly constitutes it. As a linguist, I cannot in good conscience rely on prescriptive "Strunk & White-ese", and unlike many countries, America does not have an official language-regulating body (cf. "La Academia Real" in Spain), so unfortunately we are stuck with doofuses like William Sapphire. What're you gonna do? ::)
DEar jydeacon, I'm afraid your undertone in your recent posts shows you are on the edge. As I know you to some extent outside tasbeha.org then I can say I feel so. I hope everything is ok with you. If this discussion is futile to you, then you have a choice not to read it, or participate in it. As for FR. Shenouda, it doesn't matter how many people follow him and how many resist, but generally people of Egyptian descent are too lazy to accept teachings encouraging them to read and research. Oujai
The pronounciation of Worcester as Wuster is the correct pronounciation. It is how the town is pronounced in England. I wonder to what degree pronounciation variants are based on ignorance and making the best out of the written words? I wonder what the influence of immigration is as well. In the UK there are huge numbers of immigrants who do not all speak English consistently or correctly. Many of them would pronounce Worcester incorrectly. What happens when there are so many badly speaking immigrants in an area that their wrong pronounciation prevails in that area?
It seems to me to be impossible to speak of a standard OB or GB except as a formal and in a sense artificial construct in all cases. There are no living speakers who can attempt to correct any errors, or even identify them.
Dear FR. Peter, It is said that there are still some families in villages in upper Egypt speaking purely Sa'idic Coptic. Probably that's one of the reasons more studies have been conducted on such. By the way, I reject the notion that Coptic is a dead language with a passion... Oujai
You're both wrong. In New England, it's pronounced Wustah.
Jeremy, It's good to know we were really saying the same thing all along. And like other threads, I would respond to to your post while answering someone else's questions. Hence why you keep asking "Who is ignoring?" Or "I'm not talking about so and so". I have to learn to stop doing that. I apologize.
The whole point I wanted to make was that there is no standard OB. So we can't definitively say how OB pronounces words. On the other hand, there is an official standard GB used in the Church. Like it or not.
Ophadece, are you sure it's people of Egyptian decent who are too lazy to accept teachings or is it the entire ecclesiastical body that has decided to follow GB and not OB? Or maybe it's the questions that still remain on OB's reconstruction?
Comments
The contention of Aryan was with the letter "B" to be pronounces as "v" instead of "w".
Aryan invented it to be evki and was taught that way. Only Ibrahim Ayad pronounce it evshee. M Mikhail and his immediate disciples pronounce it evki. So, who are those children you are referring to?
Please, present a standard definition of any language.
There isn't a single uniformally, officially agreed textbook on OB anywhere. Nor will there be because you keep grouping all variants of OB into one scheme or definition.
Standard definition of any language: Open a text book. It's the one that is taught.
The contention of Aryan was with the letter "B" to be pronounces as "v" instead of "w".
And yet you avoided explaining OB's pronunciation of awashe.
I am learning Latin at the moment and although I am well aware that there are also variants there based on time and geography I get the sense that I am not in the middle of an argument about authenticity. So this makes me more comfortable spending time on study.
Aryan invented it to be evki and was taught that way. Only Ibrahim Ayad pronounce it evshee. M Mikhail and his immediate disciples pronounce it evki. So, who are those children you are referring to?
By your own logic, you're proving that GB is alive. If GB is pronounced today 100% like Aryan Moftah said, it would be a static dead language. And since you acknowledge that it changes, which corroborates my philosophy on variant classification, then one must only conclude is not as dead as you make it out to be.
The books that exist on GB are already variants. lol
Did I really say that about GB? NO
Define evidence and then presented it. My definition of evidence is the manuscripts that existed before Mr. Aryan's invention.
What evidence are you looking for?
That GB existed before Aryan? I already said it didn't.
That a newly created language can be considered as authentic as a slowly changing language? I already talked about modern Hebrew
That GB must exist in manuscripts to be real? Then Cairene Arabic must be fake.
That GB is unfake? Go to church. It's the only think you'll hear in 99.99999999999999% of Coptic churches.
This is silly. If your preference is for OB, fine. But don't tell people here that OB is scientificlly better than GB.
So, we are not discussing the application of Coptic words to Arabic but a pure Coptic word.
Thanks.
I'd like to get a little more specific. All languages have variations, as you said. What you are describing is a macro situation within a country. But each variation is localized within a geography or social setting.I was talking about variations within the specific geographical region or social setting.
Um...how is what you were talking about different than what I was talking about, then? Isn't a "variation localized within a geography" the same as "variations within a specific geographical region"? ??? I don't know. I don't speak or understand any form of Greek. Yes.
Yeah, the specific "neighborhood dialects" or however you want to put it is more what I was talking about. These are subdialects of the national dialect, right? If I had to guess, they are distinguished primarily by their phonologies, which is how you get these slightly or not-so-slightly different pronunciations of words (as in Ophadece's English examples). What about the English examples provided by Ophadece? And that generally happens naturally. That's part of the process of dialect formation itself. But notice, the key here is "naturally"; the situation with Coptic is a little different since none of these variations within GB or OB have evolved naturally, and as such are more like individual variations. It is possible that subdialects could emerge from this situation, with the passage of time, but very unlikely unless one cantor's style predominates to the degree that it forms a school of pronunciation centered around that person. (e.g., if everyone learned under Mikhail el-Batanouni to the extent that they kept his pronunciation as closely as they could.) If I understand you correctly, I actually like your justification better than his, as there are certain problems with written Coptic that make going by written form alone somewhat problematic. My only reservation is that the pronunciation, no matter what variety, should vary in some regular and measurable way. The stability of a given dialect demands it. (There are, of course, a great deal of language use situations that are NOT stable and yet still may be spoken of as "dialects", "subdialects", or more precisely, "dialects in transition" or "emerging dialects".) I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. Can you clarify? Well, I am just one linguist (and not a very good one at that), but I would say that what we are looking at is the difference between the phonemic "target" and its phonetic realization. As such, I would classify them as variations on the same thing, and not necessarily as the basis for asserting a new dialect or subdialect (though such things may form part of the evidence for such an argument). Approximately:
/ne'go'ši'ei:'šun/ > [ne'go'ši'ei:'šun], [ne'go'si'jei:'šun]
It's not a big difference. It certainly isn't, by itself, comparable to the difference between, say, Egyptian Arabic and Lebanese Arabic, or Iberian Spanish and Cuban Spanish, or Nynorsk and Bokmal (two officially-recognized varieties of Norwegian).
While I bow to your superior knowledge of Coptic specifically, I disagree with the general idea that you can't have such a situation. In brief, not only can you have such a situation because it already exists (remember, linguistics is not prescriptive, it is descriptive), you can have such a situation and not have to relegate any particular single variation to a "subdialect" (or whatever you want to call it) in the absence of stronger evidence that it belongs to such a cohesive variant. To use a different example that hopefully no one here will be invested in as we are in the OB/GB discussion, disinterested linguists generally recognize Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian as variations of the same language, rather than separate languages proper (as they are recognized in the individual states in which they are spoken). They do this by the means of determining the degree of lexical similarity between the languages concerned (this is expressed as a percent, and uses rather standard methodology involving a Swadesh list or something similar). If the results are above a certain percentage (I can't remember what it is at the moment; I think 80% or somewhere around that?), they are likely to be classified as dialects of the same language, no matter what the political and cultural situation demands they be called (e.g., Hindi-Urdu: When written in the Devanagari script by Hindus, it is called Hindi; when written in the Perso-Arabic script by Muslims, it is called Urdu). I wonder what the Swadesh list results would reveal about GB and OB? I am confident that they would show a incredibly high degree of similarity, as they are only phonologically distinguishable, and even then there are many examples in between the two or a blend of the two (as you yourself wrote about). This is why I do not operate on preference alone. And at any rate, I would not say "scientifically proven" (science very rarely proves such things), rather "scientifically supported".
Oujai
Off the top of my head..
I would pronounce scone as skon and skwn (short O and long O). Both are correct in my standard English.
Also digestive biscuit, is pronounced correctly in my standard English as d-i-jestif and d-e-jestif.
There are others. It may well be that in origin these pronounciations have different geographic origins but they have come to be accepted as equally correct within the English that I use.
Also I note that my own children, as they grow up, spontaneously use the form 'brang' of the verb bring. There SHOULD be such a form, but in standard English it is no longer correct.
I only mention this to suggest that it is not likely that there is ONE form of OB which is correct since it must always have been subject to various influences even as my own correct use of English is liable to. Correct English can have multiple pronounciations of the same word, and deprecated pronounciations of words that should perhaps exist according to rules but which do not according to the development of language.
@ jydeacon,
FR. Shenouda was asked why he tolerates people less knowledgeable than him bashing him and sometimes cursing him, and he replied: "i am Christian and Christianity taught me to preach what is true ONLY"
Oujai
WOrds in Cairene Arabic are not all pronounced the same, the word 3adeya can be pronounced also as 3adya. The word yehres can be pronounced as yeharress. The word masalan can be matalan.
Oujai
Let me also answer Dzheremi's question also. He asked "Isn't a "variation localized within a geography" the same as "variations within a specific geographical region"?" What I was try to get at is one can assume that Cairene Arabic has multiple proununciation of a word, like mathalan: masalan and matalan. In this sense, Cairene Arabic is a variation localized within a geography (within Egypt and within the Middle East at large). But I would venture to guess that people who pronounce mathalan as masalan are probably more localized to a section of Cairo;localized geographically, or socially. And those who pronounce it as matalan are a different subsection of Cairo. This is what I meant by a variation within a variation. I don't have evidence to support this so I may be wrong. If I am right, then the premise that Cairene Arabic has multiple pronunciations for a single word is false. Since it's not really Cairene Arabic that has 2 pronunciation but separate (albeit very close) subsections of Cairene Arabic.
I will submit to Dzheremi's explanation of a Swadesh list. The variation between these two subsections of Cairene Arabic may not be enough to classify them as a full variant or dialect. This is a practical application of language definition. However, I was talking about linguistic theory. A difference does exist between variants, otherwise they would not be variants. If we choose to ignore the difference, then our definition of what constitues a language or a dialect is flawed. I guarantee any non-Bostonian will not know how to pronounce Worcester "correctly". I can simply ignore the fact that New England pronunciation is different and call it American English. According to my definition of American English, all non-New Englanders would not be speaking American Englsh. Logically, we should conclude that my definition of American English is wrong. This is not a great example because the difference between New-England American English and non-New England American English is greater than the differences between subsections of Cairene Arabic or variants within GB or OB.
George
Thanks.
Let me also answer Dzheremi's question also. He asked "Isn't a "variation localized within a geography" the same as "variations within a specific geographical region"?" What I was try to get at is one can assume that Cairene Arabic has multiple proununciation of a word, like mathalan: masalan and matalan. In this sense, Cairene Arabic is a variation localized within a geography (within Egypt and within the Middle East at large). But I would venture to guess that people who pronounce mathalan as masalan are probably more localized to a section of Cairo;localized geographically, or socially. And those who pronounce it as matalan are a different subsection of Cairo. This is what I meant by a variation within a variation.
And this is what I meant in my reply when I wrote "subdialects of the national dialect". There is the national dialect, and then there are variations of that based on region (within the country), economic class, sex, etc. A really good book on this with reference to Egyptian Arabic specifically is Niloofar Haeri's "The Sociolinguistic Market in Cairo: Gender, Class and Education" (1997), which gives a good overview of the use of Arabic languages in Cairo, as broken down according to the indicated factors. The line between "dialect" and any other form of language that might be used is notoriously hard to define. There is the concept of "communal dialects" which is relatively uncontroversial, as there are many famous books that attest to their existence as separate, stable norms (Haim Blanc's famous 1964 thesis "Communal Dialects of Baghdad", for instance), but these are within the larger national/regional variety, not some sort of aberration of it. To use an example from the aforementioned Blanc, Christian Arabic of Baghdad is a communal dialect within the larger milieu of Baghdadi Arabic, which is itself a prestige variety of the national variety of Iraqi Arabic, which is one of the recognizable variations of "Standard Arabic" (the internationally agreed upon entity that makes it possible for a Lebanese person to say that a Tunisian person is also speaking Arabic, even if they cannot necessarily understand each other perfectly). At no point in the chain from supranational to incredibly local varieties are they separate to the point of being different languages, even though the Arabic language is notorious for the high degree of diglossia exhibited among its speakers.
Given that in this conceptual model they operate more or less like tiers of a cake and not like inherently separate varieties, I would say that at any point along the continuum it is not possible to say with 100% conviction where one dialect ends and another begins. If you are dealing with such minute variations among Cairene speakers, then it seems to make more sense to me to note them for what they are: Variations among Cairene speakers. Maybe the variation of a particular suburb, or social group, or what have you, but still variations of Cairene if they do not mark the particular speakers as coming from another distinct region. This is no different than what is exhibited elsewhere. In Lebanon, for instance, there is commonly recognized "Jbeli" Arabic, referring to the very particular pronunciation of those from the Mt. Lebanon region, as opposed to, say, Beirut. It is still a variation of Lebanese Arabic, albeit a very distinct one. Who is ignoring the differences? It is sort of like "Worster" (I had a good friend from Somerville who would go on and on with much pride about her region's unique speech). ;) And it is. New England English is a regional variety of American English. Indeed, because it is backwards. Regional variations are precisely that: Variations on the standard. I think this is actually a better example than you might first realize, as the trouble in defining what is and what isn't "Standard American English" really does mirror the trouble in defining what is "correct" Coptic: Since no one can rightly claim to speak it natively, there is much debate on what exactly constitutes it. As a linguist, I cannot in good conscience rely on prescriptive "Strunk & White-ese", and unlike many countries, America does not have an official language-regulating body (cf. "La Academia Real" in Spain), so unfortunately we are stuck with doofuses like William Sapphire. What're you gonna do? ::)
I'm afraid your undertone in your recent posts shows you are on the edge. As I know you to some extent outside tasbeha.org then I can say I feel so. I hope everything is ok with you. If this discussion is futile to you, then you have a choice not to read it, or participate in it.
As for FR. Shenouda, it doesn't matter how many people follow him and how many resist, but generally people of Egyptian descent are too lazy to accept teachings encouraging them to read and research.
Oujai
It seems to me to be impossible to speak of a standard OB or GB except as a formal and in a sense artificial construct in all cases. There are no living speakers who can attempt to correct any errors, or even identify them.
It is said that there are still some families in villages in upper Egypt speaking purely Sa'idic Coptic. Probably that's one of the reasons more studies have been conducted on such. By the way, I reject the notion that Coptic is a dead language with a passion...
Oujai
oujai
Have you talked to them in person, Ophadece, or just hear stories that they exist? Cause you know how stories go with Egyptians... ::)
You're both wrong. In New England, it's pronounced Wustah.
Jeremy, It's good to know we were really saying the same thing all along. And like other threads, I would respond to to your post while answering someone else's questions. Hence why you keep asking "Who is ignoring?" Or "I'm not talking about so and so". I have to learn to stop doing that. I apologize.
The whole point I wanted to make was that there is no standard OB. So we can't definitively say how OB pronounces words. On the other hand, there is an official standard GB used in the Church. Like it or not.
Ophadece, are you sure it's people of Egyptian decent who are too lazy to accept teachings or is it the entire ecclesiastical body that has decided to follow GB and not OB? Or maybe it's the questions that still remain on OB's reconstruction?