12 55 Years of Arab Studies in Romania - Secţia de Arabă

SOME ASPECTS OF NEGATION IN THE LEBANESE SERIES 'AJYĀL
Iulia Anamaria Alexandru
University of Bucharest
Abstract. The Lebanese dialect has certain regional particularities, especially in what regards the
pronunciation and grammar. The negation can be a tricky matter, as the ways of expressing it in
the spoken dialects are very different than the forms we might encounter in more elevated forms of
Arabic. Along with a brief description of what we call the Lebanese dialect, the purpose of this
paper is to present some aspects of the Lebanese negation as it appears in the consulted works,
which will then be compared in the second part of our study with our remarks on the negation
based on a Lebanese series, and finally in a third part we will compare the results of our research
with the ways of rendering the negation used by a native Lebanese speaker.
Keywords: lebanese, dialect, negation, Bizri, Feghali, el-Hajje, particles.
1. Foreword
The Lebanese dialect, along with the Syrian, Palestinian, Jordanian
dialects belong to the so called oriental dialects. Fida Bizri goes beyond by saying
that it’s actually “the same language”, with small differences based on the region
or the environment where it’s actually being talked and she calls this language
Levantine Arabic. She goes on explaining that this dialectal family first appeared
as a consequence of the contact between the Arabic dialect introduced by the
Muslim conquerors in the 7 th century and between the Syriac language 1 , which
was spoken in the moment of the Muslim conquest in the region of the Levant.
Subsequently, these dialects have continued to evolve, especially regarding the
vocabulary, under the influence of Persian, Italian, Turkish, but also French and
English. (Bizri, 2010: 15)
In his turn, Hassan el-Hajje points out that the dialects belonging to the
Levantine Arabic have certain similarities. Among these similarities, some of the
most spectacular remain the pronunciation of the voiceless unaspirated uvular
consonant qaf as a glottal stop, the decrease in intensity of h, that may lead to its
1
The influence of the Syriac language on the Lebanese dialect is still strong today, especially
regarding the pronunciation and the grammar. Furthermore, certain developments of the Syriac
language can still be heard in some Syrian or Lebanese villages, among the communities that still
follow the Syriac rite, but also in the Maronite community, for which the Syriac represent a sacred
language. (Bizri, 2010: 15)
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