The development of the apostrophe with proper names in Turkish

In modern Turkish, the apostrophe is used to separate proper names from inflectional endings (İzmir’de ‘in İzmir’). This is not the case with inflected common nouns (şehirde ‘in the city’). In this respect, the apostrophe constitutes an instance of graphematic dissociation between proper names and common nouns. Interestingly, the apostrophe was originally employed to transliterate hamza and ayn in Arabic and Persian loanwords (san’at ‘art’). However, these loanwords gradually lost the apostrophe (sanat ‘art’). This implies that Turkish experienced a graphematic change whereby the apostrophe developed from a phonographic marker of glottal stop into a morphographic marker of morpheme boundaries in proper names. This refunctionalization process is illustrated by a diachronic corpus analysis based on selected issues of the newspaper Cumhuriyet from 1929–1975. The findings reveal that the use of the apostrophe with proper names was triggered by foreignness. More specifically, the apostrophe first occurred with foreign names to highlight morpheme boundaries (Eden’in ‘of Eden’) and then expanded to native names via animacy (Doğan’ın ‘of Doğan’).

The Digraph اى in the Quranic Consonantal Text and the Identification of a New Letter Shape for Final Hē in the 7th to 8th Century Arabic Script

This paper proposes a hitherto unrecognized orthographic practice in the Quranic consonantal text: use of the digraph اى ,that is, alif + denticle, to represent the noninitial glottal stop, most often adjacent to the high vowels i/ī and less commonly in other environments. This feature leads to the identification of a new letter shape for the final hē in the early Islamic Arabic hand, originating in the Nabataeo-Arabic script, which in turn can explain a number of previously enigmatic spellings in the Quranic consonantal text.

Glottal stops do not constrain lexical access as do oral stops

This study explores processing characteristics of a glottal stop in Maltese which occurs both as a phoneme and as an epenthetic stop for vowel-initial words. Experiment 1 shows that its hyperarticulation is not necessarily mapped onto an underlying form, although listeners may interpret it as underlying at a later processing stage. Experiment 2 shows that listeners’ experience with a particular speaker’s use of a glottal stop exclusively as a phoneme does not modulate competition patterns accordingly. Not only are vowel-initial words activated by [ʔ]-initial forms, but /ʔ/-initial words are also activated by vowel-initial forms, suggesting that lexical access is not constrained by an initial acoustic mismatch that involves a glottal stop. Experiment 3 reveals that the observed pattern is not generalizable to an oral stop /t/. We propose that glottal stops have a special status in lexical processing: it is prosodic in nature to be licensed by the prosodic structure.

Voicing of glottal consonants and non-modal vowels

Variation in voicing is common among sounds of the world’s languages: sounds that are analyzed as voiceless can undergo voicing, and those analyzed as voiced can devoice. Among voiceless glottal sounds in particular, voicing is widespread: linguists often expect the voiceless glottal stop [ʔ] and fricative [h] to be fully voiced, especially between vowels. In this study, we use audio recordings from Illustrations of the International Phonetic Alphabet published in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association to explore the extent to which glottal consonants and non-modal (breathy and creaky) vowels differ in terms of percentage voicing and voicing intensity in three phrasal positions. We find that voiceless [h] is only slightly less voiced than voiced [ɦ] in initial position. Between two vowels, both [h] and [ɦ] are as voiced as breathy vowels. Glottal stops and creaky vowels are both characterized by high percentages of voicing, but they differ in voicing intensity: in all phrasal positions, glottal stops generally have periods of strong and weak voicing, whereas creaky vowels are strongly voiced. In contrast, vowels described as ‘rearticulated’, ‘checked’, or ‘glottalized’ show similar drops in voicing intensity to glottal stops. We interpret these results through an articulatory lens: glottal consonants and non-modal vowels are both modulations in phonation resulting from laryngeal constriction and vocal fold spreading. We argue further that, because voicing during [ʔ] and [h] is largely predictable from respiratory and prosodic constraints, many cases of [ʔ] and [h] can be considered phonetically underspecified for voicing.

The urban Tlemcenian glottal stop in a prospective coma due to contact and accommodation: A cross-sectional investigation

Although many researchers have attempted to include age as a variable in explaining linguistic variation, the delicate mechanisms via which variability in speech relates to age-grading aspect are still incomplete in especially lesser-known Arabic-speaking communities akin to Tlemcen, an urban city in Algeria. This paper aims at cross-sectionally investigating the sociolinguistic situation occurring in the Tlemcen speech community especially concerning the use of the glottal stop, an urban realisation of classical Arabic qaf. With the help of a survey interview, questionnaire and non-participant observation, data were collected from a convenient sample of 122 participants of different age cohorts and genders from Tlemcen. The results show that the dialect contact taking place in the community is moving towards aspects of koineisation, mainly levelling and simplification. Social and psychological features are said to explain the dialectal ruralisation guided by post-adolescent and young male native urban dialect speakers, while females of all ages, including old people, are strictly preservative. Keywords: Accommodation, age, dialect contact, glottal stop, Tlemcen, speech community.

The urban Tlemcenian glottal stop in a prospective coma due to contact and accommodation: A cross-sectional investigation

Although many researchers have attempted to include age as a variable in explaining linguistic variation, the delicate mechanisms via which variability in speech relates to age-grading aspect are still incomplete in especially lesser-known Arabic-speaking communities akin to Tlemcen, an urban city in Algeria. This paper aims at cross-sectionally investigating the sociolinguistic situation occurring in the Tlemcen speech community especially concerning the use of the glottal stop, an urban realisation of classical Arabic qaf. With the help of a survey interview, questionnaire and non-participant observation, data were collected from a convenient sample of 122 participants of different age cohorts and genders from Tlemcen. The results show that the dialect contact taking place in the community is moving towards aspects of koineisation, mainly levelling and simplification. Social and psychological features are said to explain the dialectal ruralisation guided by post-adolescent and young male native urban dialect speakers, while females of all ages, including old people, are strictly preservative.

A Contrastive Study on Noun Diminutive Formation in Tafili Spoken Arabic and Jijilian Spoken Arabic

The present study aims at contrasting the patterns governing noun diminutive formation between Tafili Spoken Arabic (TSA), a dialect in Jordanian Arabic (JA), and Jijilian Spoken Arabic (JSA), a dialect in Algerian Arabic, and then accounting for that within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT). Throughout the analysis of the collected data, it is found that the diminutive forms in both dialects are based on a change in the phonological processes of a word by insertion, deletion or changing of some phonological segments. However, the present study has disclosed that noun diminutive forms in TSA result from the application of the following phonological processes: vowel epenthesis, vowel shortening, glide insertion, vowel syncope, and the insertion of the glottal stop at the beginning of words. Whereas noun diminutive forms in JSA result from the application of the following phonological processes: vowel syncope, vowel epenthesis, vowel shortening, glide insertion, degemination and metathesis. The application of OT to account for those phonological processes indicates that they happen from a continual conflict between some markedness constraints and faithfulness constraints. The researchers recommend for another study to be applied investigating and contrasting the patterns governing noun diminutive formation between other two dialects by accounting for that within the framework of OT.

PHONETIC FEATURES OF NENETS LOANWORDS IN THE OB-UGRIC LANGUAGES

The article deals with the Nenets borrowings in the Ob-Ugric languages: Khanty and Mansi. The main list of these borrowings was compiled by Wolfgang Steinitz in a work published more than half a century ago. In the paper I focus on phonetic features of the borrowed words. These borrowings represent predominantly the cultural vocabulary and are geographically quite limited being presented only in the northern dialects of Mansi and Khanty. Despite of this many of these words retain very archaic features of Nenets phonetics. This allows us to consider linguistic contacts between the Ob-Ugrians and the Nenets as rather old. Consideration of the corpus of the borrowings also allows to shed some light on the relative chronology of historical sound changes in the Nenets language. In the paper all Nenets loans in Mansi and Khanty are compared with their possible sources in Tundra Nenets and in Forest Nenets. This comparison shows that in Forest Nenets a potential corresponding word is often missing or looks phonetically too different and therefore can not be regarded as the source of borrowing. Thus, the donor language was definitely the Tundra Nenets, and not the Forest Nenets language. Mansi and Khanty words borrowed from Tundra Nenets may reflect the following archaic features of Nenets historical phonetics: final vowels (before reduction into °); final consonants, changed into the glottal stop in modern Nenets; intervocalic -m-, changed into - w- in modern Nenets; final glide -w, disappeared in modern Nenets. All words borrowed in Ob-Ugric languages from Nenets can be divided in two groups with respect to these parameters: some of them definitely preserve a more archaic state of Nenets phonetics, whereas others are phonetically much closer to modern Nenets words. Another feature that allows to evaluate the relative age of borrowings is the labialization of vowels in Kazym Khanty and in Mansi: in earlier borrowings Nenets vowel a has changed in Kazym Khanty and Mansi into a labial vowel, whereas in later ones it has preserved its original quality.