since this post i've found out that - baxt isn't totally rare across lebanon so it'd be very very possible for someone to actually have a baxt–taxt split in their native language - there's a word xälle خلة "dell" which is 100% a minimal pair with xâlle خلي "leave"!!!

about the first thing there is in fact a huge lebanon-wide debate (constantly revived thanks to the wonders of the internet) over which one exactly this word refers to. no one agrees and everyone is wrong

i was told once about a life plan, ma raḥ yoṭlaʕlak menna zmallūṭa "you're not going to get jack squat out of it" but what on earth is a zmallūṭa, in context admittedly more like "[the] tiniest thing" than literally "jack squat"? seems to be this 1883 use of zalaṭa "pebble" augmented w/ random m:

found the oldest documentation of a 'modern' lebanese dialect that i know of and perversely it ticks me off how rich it is this is gonna need 20 years to get through 😵‍💫

in the 70s jussi aro shared some fun facts about the dialect of a man named ʔaḥmad~ʔaḥmed ʕizzeddīn from a place named deir qanoun, 'near tyre', but the problem we have tracking that down today is that there are two deir qanouns near tyre. what do we do? in 2014 a lebanese person bought hard drives

القندلفت: آدو آدو آدوشة - انشالله أتوفقتو بالمَشمُشة الحرامية: أتوفقّنا و ما توفقّنا - و أشتهيناك تكون معنا أكلنا أقتل لتفرّقنا - و أشَّطونا الكدوشة

which is worse for my paper-writing: accidentally reorganizing my circadian rhythm so i fall asleep on the ride home from work and am wide awake at 3:30 am or. having to put my sources into the source manager tool

i cant fucking see

(no one will get this) kfarsghab

...how much is a flight to finland

i actually say ṣō̃dwīše, and when i was a kid i would hypercorrect to ṣō̃drīše not realizing it was at all related to sandwich (i also used to hypercorrect zēwye "corner" to zērye) other words for sandwich: • ʕarūs "bride" (which arayes is the plural of, ʕarāyis, altho curiously my family's actual

there is so much on southern lebanese arabic that was ALMOST published • 20 folktales from zrarieh jussi aro never transcribed • 9 folktales from near tyre he transcribed but waited to publish until he'd finished that^ • possibly some writings entrusted to him by the poet sahban mroueh of zrarieh ⬇️

the channel has over an hour of other recordings of fleisch's of a folk poet named sleiman saleh nehmeh/sleiman nehmeh سليمان صالح نعمة أو سليمان نعمة that the internet seems to know nothing of, i listened to this and oh my god goosebumps

16 days of grinding later, I have caught a cold, slept in sick every day, skipped offroading, skipped on workouts, missed church, & done like 3 actual days worth of work

sometimes i feel like some "random root infix"-y quadriliterals are rly blends: ṭaḥbaš "to shatter, destroy": ṭaḥaš "to attack" x ṭabaš "to slam" & once my mom gave me water to "kaḥrež" some food stuck in my throat, then was like "nah that's not a word i prob accidentally combined karrež x daḥrež"

The first ever monolingual Irish dictionary has been launched www.rte.ie/news/ireland...

marie-aimée germanos (2011) on top of being a good paper has something really respectable i've never seen before: an official english translation commissioned by the journal shs.cairn.info/journal-lang...

fida bizri (2013) "linguistic green lines in lebanon"

do i know anyone here at the university of chicago who would be willing to spot me a what i think is two pages of a book lmao book is Mélanges Maspero vol. III (1935? 1937? 1940?? idk) which allegedly contains a "Texte druse" on pp. 94–95 by Michel Feghali

why is el-rabih makki (1983) "the lebanese dialect of arabic: southern region" teaching me english too

in 200 years someone on twitter v60 is going to post this excerpt from 1902 and go "wow at the end of the 20th century english hadn't yet lost its interdentals"

feghali 1919 lists a bunch of classical "ž"~y (seems not to have been aware of older pronunciations like ǧ? surprising bc elsewhere he recognizes minutiae like classical ق being distinctly ḳ not q) that can be explained by ancient ɟ but then randomly a vernacular yāleʔ̣ < *gāleq of questionable age??

f ~ θ weirdness around r... leb dayfūr 'unripe figs' > dayθūr in 1919 (also modern daytūr) ca ṭafrah 'cream' > ṭaθrah rafaʔa 'to darn' > *raθā > leb rata a while ago i had a crack idea that *rafā > *raθā was bc of assimilation *rafā θ-θiyāb > *raθā θ-θiyāb but i guess it was really *yVrfī > *yVrθī

another syntactic feature of hers: haplogy of complementizer ma+negative ma into one sentence-level-stressed má *[maṭraḥ ma má betzīḥū] > [maṭraḥ má betzīḥū] "where you.PL don't move it" kell ma ʔuwe ḍ-ḍaww *[kell ma má menšūf] > [kell má menšūf] "the stronger the light gets the more we don't see"

neat bit of deduction you can do with this excerpt: > sometimes a /s/ turns into a /z/, e.g. ʔalmās 'diamonds' becomes ʔalmāz with an emphatic z [he means ʔalmāẓ] and /s z/ are coronal > and a /ʕ/ may turn into a /ʁ/, like ḡamīʔ for ʕamīq 'deep' or ḡabb for ʕabba 'to gulp', and /ʕ ʁ/ are laryngeal

Haha, this is hilarious editorializing

As an example, in Leila Murad's famous song satirizing classical Arabic grammar: ان جاء زيدٌ او حضر عمرو طب و احنا مالنا ان شٱلله ما حضرو 0:40 youtu.be/ROFw6yG-msk?...

reading georges sakr thanks to @shjsat.bsky.social, this has me grinning it's a great insight and it made me sad that he didn't dwell bc you absolutely could be insane enough to come up with a dialect (or at least social) taxonomy based 100% on orthographic choices (tayeb, eshi are diff words imo)

Thanks google very useful

i have no idea where this lies on the spectrum of weird to cool but i think the universe is telling me i need to read @rebeccamakkai.bsky.social books (both of these ive run into organically!!)

so greengages have an ungodly number of lebanese names: jrink jirank janērik jarēnik jararank jinarlik jaranyak and also -g instead of -k… even in fusha wiktionary lists jānarik jārink jārīnik ja(a)nīrik it's said to be from ottoman "can eriği" but it's never sat right with me if you start/

Biggest We're So Back/It's So Over Moment Of 2025 s;ljkdf i forget if i've posted this but if you search henri fleisch on youtube you come across a channel that's actually posted some of his otherwise-never-archived magnetophone recordings & i only realized today that we actually know one of them:

feghali 1919 has interesting remarks on q. his classical q almost seems like [kʼ] but he's prob describing [kˤ] lol for kfarabida he describes what i understand as the emphatic ʔ that i tried (middlingly successfully) to historicize below and then [q] in some villages, notably different from [kˤ]?

it actually scares me how much of a work of art this book is. and he was like the first person to ever do it. you can't just win the game before anyone else has even played what

i only JUST realized that anis frayha's dictionary has a traditional rhyming title muʕjamu l-ʔalfāð̣i l-ʕāmmiyyah fi l-lahjati l-lubnāniyyah (unlike in english: "a dictionary of non-classical vocables in the spoken arabic of lebanon") but how are you supposed to read the arabic title ʔiʕrāb-wise…?

Go to an oasis, and you'll see why :) www.researchgate.net/figure/Schem...

?!! turkmen?? in lebanon? i searched 'pardom kurdish' and this second paper came up w/ some info... 1st paper: www.academia.edu/34066397/Dia... 2nd paper: www.jstor.org/stable/10.13...

more (my goodness) i'm not sure what bensaria meant by "excluding the work of [...] makki, there is no study of a lebanese mountain dialect outside the mount lebanon district" since makki's work wasn't on a mountain dialect anyway i have so much emailing to do if i want to find even half of my †'s

the south lebanese village of zrarieh was basically the same as my family's ~nearby village during jussi aro's visit from finland in the 1970s (basically the same generation of speakers as those i learned arabic from)

Dam Shrimp

respectful, euphemistic terms of address from tripoli 1954 (altho due to the subject matter probably found across lebanon) ḥåḍərtak حضْرتك, "your presence": to anyone janǟbak جنابك, "your sides (kinda)/vicinity?": to anyone saɛå̄ttak سعادتك, "your happiness": to a bey, pasha, or high-ranking official

the word اللي lli, usually a relativizer (الزلمة اللي هون l-zalame lli hōn "the man that's here"), has a weird alternate usage: منيح اللي جيت mnīḥ lli jīt "good that you came" i was proud of the og idea in the 2nd pic - BUT what prob actually happened (3rd pic) is so cool (forgive clunky writing!)

if u reduce someone's workload you are literally "cutting out" part of that workload for them how am i supposed to understand the passive voice as the exact opposite 😭

tried to get some work done on the bus and got completely sniped by two ppl sitting somewhere behind me speaking a language that i swear has ʕ and õ# that i can't pick up on anything else from

there's a sort of r-like, *maybe* retroflex pronunciation of d found throughout south lebanon, you can hear it in the vid in the last post anecdotally i think i've heard it (+ for other voiced coronals) from east leb too to that point here are fleisch's 1946 notes on zahle… what is dâl niṭʿiyya?

writers block but i literally just need to finish annotating a paragraph i don't even need to come up with any ideas

here i will yap abt خِتْيَار xityār, خِتْيَارة xityāra, عَجُوز ʕajūz, and عَجُوزِة ʕajūze 1) the most common levantine word for 'old man' is خِتْيَار xityār it's a resolution of the weird onset of some form like *خْتْيَار *xtyār, from *خْتِيَار *xtiyār, the form that underlies the arabic word اِخْتِيَار ixtiyār 'choice'

i read el-hajjé 1954 le parler arabe du tripoli liban (left) first and had insane deja vu the instant i saw nakhla 1937 grammaire du dialecte libano-syrien (right) el-hajjé does have nakhla in his bibliography so i guess he used him as a guide for this part kinda, the rest of the chapter diverges