Arabic Phonemes Represented by the Spanish Letter “J”

The most difficult aspect of Arabic phonology for me, a speaker of English and Spanish, is the abundance of guttural sounds. Whereas Arabic has many phonemes in the velar /k x ɣ/, uvular /q/, pharyngeal /ʕ/, and glottal /ʔ h̴ h/ regions, Spanish and English have fewer: in Spanish the velar /k g x/, and in English the velar /k g/ and glottal /h/. The following table summarizes the guttural (velar-glottal) phonemic inventories of English, Spanish, and Arabic grouped into columns according to how the phonemes might be perceived allophonically by speakers of each language:

As seen in the table, Arabic has twice the number of guttural phonemes as Spanish and English. Additionally, many of the Arabic phonemes would be indistinguishable from each other to English and Spanish speakers, especially the three phonemes /x h̴ h/ which would most likely map to one phoneme /h/ in English and one phoneme /x/ in Spanish. This issue is illustrated by the difficulty of transliterating Arabic text into English or Spanish. The following table provides the symbols used to transliterate the guttural Arabic phonemes into English:

Notice that for the phonemes /x h̴ h/ the base character used in the transliterations is “h” to which various diacritics are added in order to differentiate the allophonic sounds (which is hinted at by the use of a common base character). The three Arabic phonemes are all voiceless guttural fricatives, only one of which occurs in English: /h/, a voiceless glottal fricative, which is written as “h”. The other two phonemes /x h̴/ are perceived as allophones of /h/ in English; therefore “h” is used for the transliteration of the three Arabic phonemes. In Spanish, the situation is much the same except that the Arabic phonemes /x h̴ h/ are perceived as allophones of the voiceless velar fricative /x/, the only guttural fricative in Spanish. This phoneme is represented in the Spanish orthography by “j” (and also by “g” when followed by “e” or “i”). This brings me to the title of this paper: “Arabic Phonemes Represented by the Spanish Letter J.”

Arabic played a large part in the history of the Spanish language. In 711 CE, the Arabic-speaking Moors invaded Spain and established a presence there that lasted until 1492 CE: a period of over 700 years. During this time, Arabic was spoken on the Iberian peninsula and it contributed many words to Spanish, such as ajedrez (chess), berenjena (eggplant), and naranja (orange). Some loan-words, such as these, are written with “j”. As I postulated in the previous paragraph, Modern Arabic has three phonemes which are allophonic to “j” or /x/. In this paper, I want to confirm this postulation, that the Arabic phonemes represented by “j” in loan-words from Arabic are /x h̴ h/. I want to determine which Arabic phonemes are represented by “j”.

The answer lies in the loan-words themselves and specifically to their respective etymologies; it can be found by comparing the loan-words with the Arabic words from which they came, looking for the Arabic sounds that correspond to the Spanish letter “j”.

The data on which I performed my analyses consist of a subset of a 1,250 word list of Arabic loan-words in Spanish. The subset is composed of words which:

1. contain the letter J,
2. have an Arabic etymological entry with transliteration in the RAE dictionary, and
   
3. were directly borrowed from Classical Arabic or an Arabic dialect such as Moroccan Arabic or “Hispanic Arabic.” Words which were originally from Arabic but came into the Spanish through a non-Arabic language were not included. For instance, the Spanish word jirafa was rejected because it came from the Italian giraffa, which came from the Arabic zurāfah.

With these restrictions, the list was shortened to 97 words, in which “j” occurs 99 times (it appears twice in two words). The following table presents the data that I used for my analyses. For each row, the Arabic loan-word appears in the “Spanish” column and the loan-word's Arabic source appears in the “Arabic” column. The “J” column shows which Arabic phoneme(s) is represented by “j” in each word. The final “Arabic” column provides the RAE etymology for each word. Note that the RAE dictionary uses a transliteration system other than the IPA.

Following the table, I will present findings.

On this data, I performed computational analyses and found the distribution of the Arabic letters which are now represented with “j”. The results were quite surprising:

Apparently contrary to my prediction, the Spanish letter “j” only represents the Arabic phonemes /x h̴ h/ in 6% of the loan-words. The vast majority (94%) of the Arabic phonemes represented by “j” are the postalveolar fricatives /ʒ ʃ /, not the guttural fricatives which I predicted. My prediction, however, is valid and the conflicting evidence is actually a key that led me to not only a confirmation of my hypothesis, but also to a discovery of a unique aspect of the history of Arabic loan-words in Spanish. The conclusions that I drew from the analysis I find quite interesting:

1. The letter “j” used to represent the phoneme / ʃ / (of which [ʒ] was an allophone) instead of the current Spanish phoneme /x/. I verified this conclusion by consulting Rafael Lapesa's Historia de la lengua española. Of further interest, Lapesa states that “j” represented / ʃ / only until the 16th century, after which it came to represent /x/ (p. 204).
2. The majority (over 90%) of Arabic loan-words were borrowed before the Reconquista (late 15th century) when Arabic was still spoken on the Iberian peninsula. The evidence for this is that the Spanish phoneme / ʃ / existed solely in medieval Spanish. Therefore, loan-words in which the phoneme occurs were most likely borrowed during that period. Of the words in the data set, 94% had “j” for / ʃ /.
3. The Arabic loan-words which contained /x h̴ h/ were borrowed after the 16th century and amounted to a small number, under 10%, of all Arabic borrowings; this is the converse of the previous conclusion.  Further evidence for this lies in the etymologies of the few Arabic loan-words from the data set which contain /x h̴ h/: most are from Moroccan Arabic. The influence of Moroccan Arabic would have become most pronounced after the overwhelming Arabic influence of the Moors had ended with their expulsion in 1492. So these words from Moroccan Arabic, which have /x h̴ h/ written as “j”, were most likely borrowed after the Reconquista, when /x/ had taken over in Modern Spanish. However, the influence of Moroccan Arabic on Spanish would have been much less since the Mediterranean sea separated them, and therefore fewer loan-words were borrowed after the Reconquista. Of the loan-words in the data set, only 6% had “j”  transliterated for /x/.
4. The phonological shift of / ʃ → x/ that occurred in the 16th century was applied to the Arabic loan-words from the Medieval period. Because of this, the old Arabic borrowings continued to be written with “j”, whereas the small number of new Arabic loan-words which contained the phonemes /x h̴ h/ were also written with “j”. This explains why “j” can represent both /ʒ ʃ / and /x h̴ h/ in Arabic loan-words: the letter's phonemic value changed over time and was thus employed to transliterate different Arabic phonemes.

The following table summarizes the distribution of when Arabic words were borrowed into Spanish and how the Arabic phonemes were collapsed into Spanish ones:

In conclusion, my hypothesis was correct that the Arabic phonemes /x h̴ h/ would be interpreted as allophones of the one Spanish phoneme /x/ and hence written “j”. However, it is only valid in Modern Spanish as the phoneme /x/ was / ʃ / before the 16th century.

Bibliography

• Batzarov, Zdravko. “Arabic loan-words in Spanish.” Orbis Latinus. 15 OCT 2004
  <http://www.orbilat.com/Languages/Spanish/Vocabulary/Arabic_words.html>
• Diccionario de la lengua española. Real Academia Española. 2003
  <http://buscon.rae.es/diccionario/drae.htm>
  
• Lapesa, Rafael. Historia de la lengua española. Madrid: Gredos, 1981
  
• Pedersen, Thomas. “Arabic script.” Transliteration of Non-Roman Scripts. 15 OCT 2004
  <http://ee.www.ee/transliteration/pdf/Arabic.pdf>