- NB: Pretérito, throughout the book, is used in the sense of Past, as in the sequence Past, Present, Future, and, in verbal categories: Past/Non-Past. It (pretérito) is not to be confused with Eng. prelerite.
- Dicionário de Falos Gramaticais, Rio, 1956. Cf. Language, 33 (1957), 193–5. The absence of Jakobson et al., Preliminaries to Speech Analysis, from his list of works consulted led me to suppose that he had not consulted it; in a personal communication, he has since informed me that he consulted it, but omitted it as too technical for his audience. Also, the fact that I wrote the review in Taxco, Mexico, without library facilities, prevented my appreciating his extensive previous publications, and lead me into the impertinence of hoping he would soon write a book he had already written! For these and any other personal injuries I may have done him, it is a pleasure to offer him here my apologies.
- This replacement of one tense by the other has a certain historical interest. I have pointed out elsewhere that it began as early as the first part of the 15th century. It seems to have been spreading gradually since that date, and is now complete, or virtually so, in colloquial Brazilian. Cf. Two Old Portuguese Versions of the Life of Saint Alexis, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1953, § 10. I. B and note 117.
- For a recent example of this phenomenon, see the controversy between Leo Spitzer and Stephen Gilman, à propos of the letter's book, The Art of La Celestina, in Hispanic Review, XXV (1957), pp. 1–25 and 112–21.
- Leaving aside as irrelevant such figurative expressions as ‘scientific tennis’, it must still be admitted that the zealots of such disciplines as Naval Science, Library Science and Domestic Science, are doing their best to fill the vacuum, and one may look forward to an unhappy day when Eng. science may become as vague and all-inclusive a term as Wissenschaft. I insist upon the point because there seem to me to exist two schools of linguists and two schools of literary critics in the United States and elsewhere, one of which (in each case) uses a Newtonian methodology and considers itself scientific for that reason, the other of which does not use such a methodology, and does not wish to. In the latter event, 'science' = 'Wissenschaft', and is a bad translation.
- The transcription used here is that of the book except that x is used for the voiceless velar spirant and ḥ and 'for the voiceless and voiced pharyngal spirants in place of the symbols used by el-Hajjé.
- See C. A. Ferguson, Two problems in Arabic phonology Word 13: (1957).
- For an overall survey of the literature, see J. Cantineau, « La Dialectologie arabe », in Orbis IV (1955), pp. 149–69. For a more detailed survey on Egyptian Arabic, see R. S. Harrell, «Egyptian Arabic Studies», in Middle East Journal, X (1956), pp. 307–12. In this review, words in Mitchell's transcription are cited in italics while my own phonemicizations are enclosed in slashes. My data on Egyptian Arabic stem primarily from monitoring radio broadcasts in the colloquial, working over these and other recordings with native informants, and many hours of informal conversing with speakers of the dialect.
- Cf. R. S. Harrell's review of the present work in Studies in Linguistics 12 (1957), p. 86–90, and C. A. Ferguson's review of H. Birkeland, Growth and Structure of the Egyptian Arabic Dialect (Oslo, 1952), in Language XXX (1954), pp. 558–564, cf. esp. n. 2.
- W. H. T. Gairdner, The Phonetics of Arabic (Oxford, 1925). On the absence of /ž/, cf. p. 63, and n. 1; on /q/, cf. p. 26; on short /e/ and /o/, cf. pp. 40 and 42; on extra-short vowels, cf. pp. 67–68; on the non-elision of /a/, ci. ibid.
- Here Mitchell should have followed Gairdner, p. 19, but didn't. Cf. also C. A. Ferguson, «The Emphatic L in Arabic », in Language XXXII (1956), pp. 446–452.
- Mitchell himself mentions one exception to this nonelision of /a/ (p. 150, n. 4) in the form maráatu ‘his wife’ vs. limráatu ‘to his wife’. As a matter of fact, I gather from my own data that the typically Cairene form is /ṃuṛá:tu/, despite the suffix-less /ṃáṛa/, ‘woman, wife’, with elision of /u/ in /limrá:tu/ quite regular even according to Mitchell's rules.
- I have tried to work this out in detail (or another dialect in my “Base and Affix in Arabic Morphophonemics”, in Scripta Hierosolymilan, (Jerusalem, to appear).
- In three radio playlets totaling one hour of tape, this use of /ma/ occurs 13 times. This does not of course mean that it always occurs once every five minutes, but it suggests that “rare” is not the right word for this usage. I hasten to add that Mitchell's numerous other references as to the frequency or rarity of constructions (an impressionistic but unavoidable procedure in this sort of work) correspond quite closely to mine.
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