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Arabic Dialects used in the North
West of Saudi Arabia:Shamari Arabic (Hail)
Abstract Mahmoud El Salman and Eid Al Haisoni discuss the dialect of Hail which, as far as we know, has not been studied in depth. This dialect is also very significant as it contains many lexical items from classical Arabic. It was interesting to find some words used by members of this tribe that were part of classical poetry. Moreover, there is a generational difference as much of the speech of the informants classified as being in the youth or middle-aged groups was understood and comprehended, while that of those classified as elderly was not to a very large extent. This could be considered an area trapped in the past in that old linguistic forms are still preserved. The surprise is that the vernacular of many informants explicates that the pure Shamari dialect still dominates their speech. The difficulty of understanding those informants, especially the elderly, manifested itself through phonology, vocabulary, and even grammar. Lexical items, including some words that are not familiar in other native dialect, were used and considered part of the Shamari informants' repertoire. |
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Arabic Loanwords in
Hebrew
HASEEB SHEHADEH Abstract Haseeb Shehadeh’s article on Arabic loanwords in Hebrew is interesting as it shows the influence of Arabic on both spoken and written Hebrew, which took place in the medieval and modern periods of Hebrew, and whose vocabulary forms more than half of the Hebrew lexicon according to the renowned dictionary of Abraham Even Shoshan. Arabic influence was present on Jewish culture both deep and comprehensive during two main historical periods— the Middle Ages in Andalucia for eight centuries and the modern era in Palestine, where the contacts between Jews and Arabs never stopped. For more than 1,700 years Hebrew was a written language that was hardly spoken at all. The eight centuries of Arab rule in Andalucia left a deep linguistic impact on Hebrew in general and on its translations in particular. Arabic was the lingua franca and the language of science and culture. Even the great scholar Maimonides (d. 1204) could not avoid the vernacular, Judaeo-Arabic, impinging on his written Arabic, the language of sciences and culture, when he wrote his only book in Hebrew, Mishne Torah5. |
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