Grammar
It is characterized by the loss of the pharyngeals and, the interdental fricatives, and, and diphthongs. But it also has /lˤ/, /rˤ/ and /mˤ/ as extra phonemic emphatics. Some examples of minimal pairs for such emphatics are /ɡallab/ "he galloped", /ɡalˤlˤab/ "he got angry"; /karra/ "he tore", /karˤrˤa/ "he dragged"; /amm/ "uncle", /amˤmˤ/ "mother". In addition, Nigerian Arabic has the feature of inserting an /a/ after gutturals (ʔ,h,x,q). Another notable feature is the change of Standard Arabic Form V from tafaʕʕal(a) to alfaʕʕal; for example, the word taʔallam(a) becomes alʔallam. The first person singular of verbs is different from its formation in other Arabic dialects in that it does not have a final t. Thus, the first person singular of the verb katab is katáb, with stress on the second syllable of the word, whereas the third-person singular is kátab, with stress on the first syllable.
The following is a sample vocabulary:
| word | meaning | notes |
|---|---|---|
| anīna | we | |
| 'alme | water | frozen definite article 'al |
| īd | hand | |
| īd | festival | |
| jidãda, jidãd | chicken, (collective)chicken | |
| šumāl | north |
The two meanings of īd stem from formerly different words: *ʔīd "hand" < Classical yad vs. *ʕīd "festival" < Classical ʕīd.
Read more about this topic: Chadian Arabic
Famous quotes containing the word grammar:
“All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, treble or centuple use and meaning.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)