Jordanian Arabic Phonology and Morphology Essay

Jordanian Arabic Phonology and Morphology - Essay Example As the report declares a major difference in the syllabic inventory of the two languages is in the presence of the super-heavy syllable of the form CVVC in Arabic and its dialects. This does not exist in the syllable-structure in English. Although there are many other points of difference between English and Jordanian Arabic from the phonological point of view, including rules of transformation and optimality theoretical constraints, the discussion has been restricted here to these basic points of difference. This paper compares the two languages- English and Jordanian Arabic- in terms of the morphology that characterizes them. One of the principal characteristics of Semitic morphology is its being non-linear or non-concatenative: instead of morphemes being placed linearly before the stem as prefixes and suffixes as in English, the morphemic structure of Semitic words is characterized by two or more morphemes interwoven within each other in a discontinuous fashion. One morpheme is inserted into another in certain slots of the word-stem structure. Neither the root-morpheme nor the morpheme to which it is attached (also called the template) free. They are both bound morphemes and only when a certain root and a template merge a definite word is completely specified phonologically, morphologically and semantically. In the case of third-person pronouns, English has he/she/it for singular while Jordanian Arabic has a dichotomy: objects ending with â€Å"taa’ murboota† take the pro noun â€Å"hiyeh† and rest take â€Å"howa†.