University of Bucharest

‗Abbās H}urayzāwī, a contemporary poet and a native of Sūsangard, does in his
mis}rā‗: 30
… // Yā s}āh}bi čarh~ iz-zimān ib-dōr.
‗Oh my companion, the wheel of time is in rotation‘.
The Persian word čarh~ meaning ‗wheel, fortune, fate‘ 31 is put in a
construct state where it retains its original meaning. This word also appears in
Iraqi Arabic, even though there is confusion as to what it exactly means there. In
his dictionary on the foreign loans in spoken Baġdādī, Majīd Muh}ammad gives
čarih~ in the meaning ‗hurry‘, and čarh~ala in the meaning ‗a walk‘, so it bears a
slightly different meaning. 32 For both words he nevertheless gives Persian as
origin, but in Persian none of the two meanings can actually be found. The Iraqi
Arabic dictionary of Woodhead-Beene, on the other hand, mentions čarih~ (Pl.
čurūh~) as ‗wheel‘ and čarh~ala (Pl. -āt) as ‗spin, turn, revolution‘. 33
4. Conclusions
During the analysis of the poems it occurred to me that the motive for the
use of classicisms and other non-dialectal forms may as well have metrical
reasons. This can be the case when dialectal short vowels were substituted for
classical long ones. But poetry as a genre requires to some extent a language close
to literary Arabic given the eloquence of the speech and the sublimity of the
subject matter. Having this in mind, one should be cautious about trying to define
the characteristics of a dialect reflected in the texts. Moreover, the poets
themselves could have introduced literary forms as hypercorrections because
these give a better expression to the purport of their message.
From the features of the ‗Amāra-variety of H~ūzistāni Arabic discussed
previously, one is certainly not to be found in the corpus. The letter jīm is in every
case written in its regular form (ج), though its pronunciation should be a voiced
postalveolar fricative /ž/. In view of the fact that other sounds alien to Classical
Arabic are written with the letters borrowed from Persian (g as گ and č as چ), one
may expect the letter ژ to be used for /ž/. Whereas throughout Iraq, the /g/ and /č/
30
Pūr-Kāz}im 1378/1999, 473-474.
31
Dihh~udā 1377/1998, 8100-8102.
32
Muh}ammad 1990, 126-127.
33
The dictionary even gives a verbal form čirah~ ‗to turn on a lathe‘ as the basic word, from which
the other ones are derived, see Woodhead-Beene 1967, 84.
48