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Kuwaiti Arabic idioms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

Mahmoud Aziz F. Yassin
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Extract

Publications by Weinreich, Chafe, Makkai, and Mitchell have put the problem of idiom formation in the focus of attention. Kuwaiti Arabic (KA) idioms, however, seem to have received very little attention or no serious attention from professional linguists. The majority of KA idioms are semantically specialized phrases that belong to a more informal or colloquial level of speech.

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , February 1978 , pp. 67 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1978

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References

1 cf. Weinreich, U., ‘Problems in the analysis of idioms’, in Puhvel, J. (ed.), Substance and structure in language, Berkeley, 1969, 23–81.Google Scholar

2 cf. Chafe, W. L., ‘Idiomaticity as an anomaly in the Chomskyan paradigm’, in Foundations of Language, iv, 2, 1968, 109–27.Google Scholar

3 cf. Makkai, A., Idiom structure in English, The Hague, 1972.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Mitchell, T. F., ‘Linguistic “goings-on”: collocations and other lexical matters arising on the syntagmatic record’, Archivum Linguisticum, NS, II, 1971Google Scholar, reprinted in Mitchell, 's Principles of Firthian linguistics, London, 1975, 99–139.Google Scholar

5 KA idioms have been collected from a variety of sources: (i) written texts, notably al-Zayd, K. S., Min al-amthāl al-'āmmiyya, Kuwait, 1961Google Scholar; al-Nūrī, A., al-Amthāl al-dārija fī'l-Kuwayt, Beirut, 1968Google Scholar; (ii) recordings from Kuwaiti plays and films and from natural conversations of Kuwaitis.

6 Weinreich, , art. cit.Google Scholar

7 cf. Chomsky, N., Current issues in linguistic theory, The Hague, 1964.Google Scholar

8 cf., e.g., E. Bach who believes that there is a universal set of transformations which each language draws from in its way, ‘On some recurrent types of transformations’, in Kreidler, C. W. (ed.), Report of the sixteenth annual round table meeting on linguistics and language studies, Washington, D.C., 1965, 3–18.Google Scholar

9 Weinreich, , art. cit.Google Scholar

10 cf. Bazell, C., ‘Meaning and the morpheme’, Word, xviii, 1 –2, 1962, 141.Google Scholar

11 Chafe, , art. cit., 112.Google Scholar

12 For the reading conventions of KA forms see Johnstone, T. M., Eastern Arabian dialect studies, London, 1967Google Scholar, translated into Arabic by A. M. al-Ḍobayb, Riyad University Press, 1975; Yassin, , ‘Bi-polar terms of address in Kuwaiti Arabic’, BSOAS, XL, 2, 1977, 297–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 cf. Kooij, J., ‘Diachronic aspects of idiom formation’, in Kraak, A. (ed.), Linguistics in the Netherlands, Assen, Amsterdam, 1975, 122–7.Google Scholar

14 Mitchell, , art. cit., 126.Google Scholar

15 The folk-tale says that a rooster lays only one egg in its lifetime.

16 /ṣạƹạw/ (sing. /ṣƹạwa/), a kind of migrating bird that remains in Kuwait for only a short time during which it does not lay any eggs.

17 Mitchell, , art. cit., 126.Google Scholar

18 Bazell, , art. cit., 141.Google Scholar

19 Mitchell, , art. cit., 127.Google Scholar

20 Before the period of oil prosperity, Kuwaitis used to dissuade their children from playing in the streets during the midday heat by telling them stories about /ḥma:rit ilga:yla/, a fictitious donkey said to be on the loose during midday, looking for children to eat up.