User:Drmaik/tunisian
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[edit] Syllable
Tunisian Arabic, like many other North African varieties, has a very different syllable structure from Standard Arabic. Two consonants in the onset is common, the nucleus may contain a short or long vowel, and the coda may have maximally three consonants. Word-internal syllables are generally heavy in that they either have a long vowel in the nucleus or consonant in the coda. Non-final syllables composed of just a consonant and a short vowel (i.e. light syllables) are very rare, and generally loans from Standard Arabic, as short vowels in this poistion have generally been lost, resulting in the many initial CC clusters. For example /ʒawa:b/ reply is a loan from Standard Arabic, but the same word has the natural development /ʒwa:b/, which is the usual word for letter.
In much of the verb morphology and vowel shifting and elision which occurs in possessed nouns, e.g.
stuff my stuff her stuff man my husband her husband
This regular morphological change mainatians haevy non-final syllables throughout, bit is not exceptionless: the reader will find mnay words given in this articvle do not conform to the ‘rule’. However we assume that thie aversion to light open syllables accounts for the devlopmetn of such forms as man, language and trust. A coda in CCC occurs mainly with the suffixation of // to verbs as part of the negatice circumfix, as in I did not see, where the suffix is soemtimes preceded by an epenthetic vowel. Phonetic epenthesis also occurs at a word boundary where the onset of the second word is CC and the preceding word ends in at least one consonant, e.g.
a strong man
This is one of the few cases where a Berber substratum may be usefully evoked.
[edit] conjugation
| Person | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| 3rd (m) | ktib | kitbu |
| 3rd (f) | kitbit | kitbu (as 3rd m.) |
| 2nd | ktibt | ktibtu |
| 1st | ktibt | ktibna |
imperfective
| Person | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| 3rd (m) | jiktib | jiktibu |
| 3rd (f) | tiktib | jiktibu (as 3rd m.) |
| 2nd | tiktibt | ktibtu |
| 1st | niktib | niktibu |
