Although the French term diglossie was introduced by the Arabist William Marc°ais in 1930 (Marc°ais 1930), it is the late Charles A. Ferguson who is most often credited as the first to introduce the notion of a``high'' (H) and a``low'' (L) variety or register of a language in a classic (1964 [1959]) article in the journal Word with the now famous one-word title,``Diglossia.'' The gist of his widely influential essay was to demonstrate that the idea of H and L registers best explained the pervasive linguistic distinctions observable in a few speech communities concerning the strict complementary distribution of formal vs. informal usage. For Ferguson, who calqued the term from the French, there were only four``defining'' languages that he considered representative: Arabic, Swiss German, Haitian Creole, and Modern Greek. This essay reviews some of the voluminous diglossia literature and focuses on the linguistic situation in the Arab world, presenting ideas about future research prospects (such as the diglossic continuum). Although the French term diglossie was introduced by the Arabist William MarcË ais in 1930 (MarcË ais 1930), it is the late Charles A. Ferguson who is most often credited as the ®rst to introduce the notion of a``high'' (H) and a``low'' (L) variety or register of a language in a classic (1964 [1959]) article in the journal Word with the now famous one-word title,`D iglossia.'' The gist of his widely in¯uential essay, which has been reprinted several times, was to demonstrate that the idea of H and L registers best explained the pervasive linguistic distinctions observable in a few speech communities concerning the strict complementary distribution of formal vs. informal usage. For Ferguson, who calqued the term from the French, there were only four``de®ning'' languages that he considered representative: Arabic, Swiss German, Haitian Creole, and Modern Greek. Since then, many other languages (in actuality, the speech communities that speak them) have been reevaluated as diglossic, 0165±2516/01/0152±0117 Int'l.
An account of consonantal ‘twinning’ in English and other languages.THIS ESSAY concerns itself with gemination in English, but more specifically, it asks whether English has consonantal gemination (CG), as has been reported by some in the literature. Gemination is usually defined as a phonetic doubling (cf. Latin geminus ‘twin’); however, phonetic length (as opposed to a single or nongeminated segment) is a more accurate designation (see Matthews 1997:141, who cites Italian atto [at[Length mark]o] ‘act’, making reference only to ‘doubling’). It has long been known that English does not have contrastive CG as is recognized, say, from the phonemic difference between Classical and Modern Standard Arabic kasara (‘he broke’) and kassara (‘he smashed’) or darasa (‘he studied’) and darrasa (‘he taught’).
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