Arabic for Godless Heathens: Part II

I'm standing in front of the vending machine, cradling just enough spare change to buy either a cup of coffee or a generic sports drink.  I had fallen off the wagon the night before and bought a pack of cigarettes on my way to the bar.  When I woke up this morning they were gone.  Which was a good thing because I didn't have any more and also a bad thing because, well, I didn't have any more.

In the end, hydration trumped stimulation, and I wandered into the classroom, the mountain blue beverage doing what it could to restore me to some semblance of an intelligent life form.

Of course, this is not the language to attempt to speak after your throat has been dried and smoked like a piece of beef jerky.  I've had, in the past, a fairly jaundiced opinion of languages who make use of the dark and phlegmy nether regions of the vocal tract.  I will even admit to once describing a certain Central Asian language as “like trying to speak Turkish while choking on a fish bone.”

But, I like to think that my rehabilitation is underway, if slowly.  Arabic contains by far the largest number of unfamiliar sounds in any language I've run up against so far.  There's Q, of course, which is like a K, but further back in the mouth, with your cheeks pulled in slightly.  As well as KH, the raspy sound heard in Germany and Scotland and (as we pointed out in our Word of the Moment for Fox) prehistoric England.  This sound is sometimes also written as CH or an X.

But there's also GH, which is a similar sound to KH, but with the vocal chords running, turning a dry gurgle into a wet gargle.  Arabic also has two H's, little-h which is familiar from such words as “house” and “hill,” as well as BIG-H, which is the sound one makes when breathing on a pair of glasses to before wiping them off.

My favorite sounds, however, are the so-called “heavy” or “emphatic” consonants, which (since I've already used upper-case letters) I like to write with an exclamation point: T!, D!, S! and Z!.   From what I can gather, what makes a consonant emphatic has more to do with how it used to be pronounced, rather than how it sounds today (and apparently nothing to do with the enthusiasm with which one says it, either).

The pronunciation of these emphatic consonants varies from one Arabic to another, so the only guide I have are the descriptions from the teacher (who is from Kuwait, by the way):

T!: Like a T, but with the throat tightened.  It sounds “deeper” than a regular T.
D!: Like a D, but pronounced while lightly biting the tip of one's tongue.
S!: Like an S, but with the body of the tongue pressed against the roof of the mouth.
Z!: Pronounced with the tongue pushed up against the back of your front teeth, vocal chords running.

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