User talk:Majd Kajan

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Again, welcome!

مرحبا!

أهلا وسهلا بك في ويكاموس. شكرا لمساهماتك. أتمنى أن يروقك هذا الفضاء وأن تقرر المساهمة على الدوام. هذه وصلات مفيدة للمشاركين الجدد:

• دليل ويكاموس
• كيف أحرر صفحة ما
• كيف أنشئ صفحة ما
• منهاج التنسيق
• معايير قبول الصفحات
• ساحة لعب ويكاموس (حيث يمكنك تجريب الصيغ بأمان)
• ويكاموس ليس ...
• أسئلة مكررة

أتمنى أن تستمتع بالمساهمة هنا وبانضمامك إلى فريق الويكاموسيين! بالمناسبة، يمكنك التوقيع باسمك في صفحات النقاش والتصويت باستعمال أربع موجات، هكذا ~~~~، تولد هذه الصيغة اسمك وتاريخ التحرير آليا. إذا كان لديك أي سؤال، اطلع على صفحات المساعدة ولا تتردد في طرحه على الميدان أو علي مباشرة في صفحة نقاشي. مرة أخرى، أهلا بك!

فين أخاي (talk) 02:47, 30 November 2020 (UTC)

About vowels

Hey! I see Fenakhay beat me to the welcome spiel already, but I'll second it and add that it's really great to gain a North Levantine contributor :) I also just wanted to bring the matter of vowels to your attention real quick -- specifically that "North Levantine Arabic" encompasses both urban Syrian and Lebanese, so it's a good idea to try to get our transcriptions to account for both. (Unfortunately, Wiktionary isn't equipped to handle every single accent and variant found in those regions, so a lot of regional stuff has to go unrecorded... but we can at least try to cover common/"stereotypical" pronunciations in each country!)

For North Levantine, that gives us a few things to take note of in the interest of keeping things neutral:

• In transliteration, the standard I was trying to work with (before I stopped coming here as much, at least) was to stick to ā for all instances of long alif, not ē, even in Lebanese/North(?) Syrian cases where the vowel is pronounced as /eː/. You're good here. On the other hand, it's best for phonemic IPA to make a point of showing both, e.g. including both /kteːb/ and /ktaːb/ in an entry for كتاب.
  • (ktab was just an abstract example but I see that the North Levantine IPA for it actually does show only the latter pronunciation lol)
• Even though some Lebanese accents (including mine) and most Syrian accents pronounce the kasra vowel as [e] when it's in a closed+final syllable, it should still be taken as an /i/. This should apply to both transliteration and IPA.
  • Example: in مشكلة, the plural should be mašākil rather than mašākel, and if we had IPA for the plural, then it would be best transcribed /maʃaːkil, maʃeːkil/.
• Both in transliteration and in phonemic IPA, the Damascene vowel ə should just be considered an /i/... since it's just an /i/ but stressed, basically (I know it's open to debate but that's more or less it lol), and doing it this way lets us account for all the Syrian+Lebanese dialects that don't have an audible ə in that case.
  • Example: in مشكلة again, the IPA would be better starting /mi-/ than with /mə-/
• We shouldn't confuse the epenthetic vowel with /i/, because it attracts stress differently; for example, for those of us who pronounce كتبت (katabit, “she wrote”) with an [e] at the end rather than an [i], the only thing audibly telling it apart from كتبت (katabət, “I wrote”) is whether the stress is on the ka or the ta. Similarly, *مِشِكلة (*mišikle, “problem”) would have to be stressed on the syllable šik (compare the stress in إجتني (ʔiʒitni) or أئمّة (ʔaʔimme)), even though the actual word مشكلة is stressed on the beginning.
  • Example: in مشكلة for a third time(!), the IPA is perfect, but the transliteration should probably be mišəkle or mišᵊkle -- or even just miškle -- instead of mišikle.
• I have no idea what to do about diphthongs. It feels wrong to transliterate ay aw and transcribe /aj aw/ for general Syrian, and it feels wrong to transliterate ē ō and transcribe /eː oː/ for general Lebanese. So idunno, you can take your pick if you ever run into this.

That's all, I hope it wasn't too much! I definitely won't modify any of your pages myself to force my opinions onto them, especially seeing I've mostly stopped editing on Wiktionary, but I just wanted to bring this stuff to your attention for future contributions. Thanks again for working on North Levantine! —M. I. Wright (talk, contribs) 10:41, 30 November 2020 (UTC)