THE PHENOMENON OF AL-IBDAL IN THE QUR'AN (Morphological Analysis in Surah Ali Imran)

In learning Arabic, one of the important and interesting rules to study is the Ibdal rule: namely the replacement of letters in a word, which is not only studied from the aspect of morphology, but also in Arabic orthography and rasm al-Mushaf.This study uses a qualitative approach to literature study. The primary data source is studied in Surah Al-Imran which consists of 200 verses, 3508 words, and 14984 letters. While the secondary data sources are books, articles, and research results related to the problem of Ibdal.The results of this study indicate that the Ibdal in Surah al-Imran is 32 words (0.91%) and some of them are repeated several times. The Ibdal phenomenon consists of Ibdal pronoun (dhamir), Ibdal tsumma with fa, and the sentence Ibdal.

Short Vowels and Context Effects: The Case of English Speakers Reading Arabic

The present study examines the impact of both short vowels and context on adult native English speakers’ reading accuracy of Arabic orthography. To this end, two groups of adult Arabic learners with different proficiency levels were recruited: 30 second-year, and 30 third-year learners. Subjects were instructed to read 50 isolated words, 20 sentences and 10 paragraphs in two different reading conditions: vocalized and unvocalized. Findings demonstrated a significant positive influence of both short vowels and context on second-year learners’ word recognition of the target stimuli. That is, second year Arabic learners had better accuracy when reading vocalized texts compared to unvocalized ones and were significantly more accurate at reading paragraphs and sentences than isolated words. However, third-year students’ reading accuracy was only significantly affected by the reading context.

‘The Tale of the Cairene and the Countryman’

This short article offers a revised transcription and English translation of Qiṣṣat al-maṣrī wa-l-rīfī ‘The Tale of the Cairene and the Countryman’ as found in AIU VII.C.16, with grammatical notes. This new edition of the text demonstrates that Goitein’s (1972) rendering of the manuscript concealed significant orthographic features, which indicate a later date of composition than Goitein proposed. Since its publication, Goitein’s (1972) edition of AIU VII.C.16 has been widely used among students and scholars of Judaeo-Arabic as a guideline for dating other Judaeo-Arabic texts of the Ottoman era. The fragment’s importance in contemporary scholarship continues, rendering a revised edition an indispensable resource for future generations of Judaeo-Arabic scholars. Keywords: Judaeo-Arabic – Middle Arabic – orthography – folk tales – Qiṣṣat al-maṣrī wa-l-rīfī

Nurturing Jawi Through Education: Mirroring Jawi Education in Aceh and Malaysia

As Jawi – the Arabic orthography used to write Malay language – deals with more challenges in this sophisticated era, it requires more severe acts of nurturing its existence, one of which, education. Inferred to be originated from Aceh, the massive dissemination of Jawi got through the Malay Archipelago countries, including Malaysia, where it, compared to other countries, receives better treatment for its development nowadays. This paper seeks to trace the origin of Jawi and its development in the light of education in Aceh and Malaysia. The findings reveal that Jawieducation in Malaysia has better developed with its outstanding features. Relevant journal articles, books, reports, and online pages are consulted to obtain the real picture of Jawi education in both countries. Positive innovations developed in Malaysian schools are expected to set a new benchmark for Jawi education in Aceh in particular and in other Indonesian provinces which are concerned over Jawi education like Riau, Islands of Riau, South Sumatera, North Sumatera, and Jambi.

Arabizi Among Kuwaiti Youths: Reshaping the Standard Arabic Orthography

Arabizi is a trendy language phenomenon utilized by young Arabs to communicate across various social platforms. Young Kuwaitis seem to not be any exception in that regard. This paper aims mainly at investigating the linguistic features of Arabizi as produced by the young generation in Kuwait, and the reasons for which the practice has been persistent amongst the youth community. The main corpus data was collected from spontaneous WhatsApp chats of 35 young Kuwaiti respondents who provided 400 of their e-messages to be linguistically analyzed by the researcher. A digital questionnaire was also implemented to illicit respondents’ responses on the reasons for which young Kuwaitis use Arabizi in their e-messages. Due to the heterogeneity of the spontaneous corpus, supplemental data was provided from a story writing that was sent to the respondents to be re-written in the style they choose when they normally chat on WhatsApp. From a linguistic point of view, the study reveals a number of tendencies that place Arabizi as a unique method of communication with a profile that employs both transcription and transliteration in the way it represents its consonants vs. vowels, Kuwaiti dialectical phoneme shifts and the wide use of extralinguistic features. Intensive code-switching and mixing has also been displayed. The present study also signifies a number of sociolinguistic reasons for which Kuwaiti users of Arabizi employ the script in their e-communication across social platforms.

The representation of some phrases in Arabic word semantic vector spaces

We demonstrate several ways to use morphological word analogies to examine the representation of complex words in semantic vector spaces. We present a set of morphological relations, each of which can be used to generate many word analogies. 1. We show that the difference-vectors for pairs which have the same relation to each other are similarly aligned. 2. We suggest that addition of difference-vectors is a useful phrase-building operator. 3. We propose that pairs in the same relation may have similar relative frequencies. 4. We suggest that homographs, which necessarily have the same semantic vectors, can sometimes be separated into different vectors for different senses, using frequency estimates and alignment constraints obtained from word analogies. 5. We observe that some of our analogies seem to be parallel, and might be combined. We use Arabic words as a case study, because Arabic orthography includes verb conjugations, object pronouns, definitive articles, possessive pronouns, and some prepositions in single word-forms. Therefore, a number of short phrases, built up of easily perceived constituents, are already present in stock semantic spaces for Arabic available on the web. Similar phrases in English would require including bigrams or trigrams as lemmas in the word embedding, although English derivational morphology allows for other relationships in standard semantic spaces which Arabic does not, for example negation. We make our corpus of morphological relations available to other researchers.