I was watching the BBC programme The Story of the Jews and I noticed that the presenter, Simon Schama consistently pronounces Sinai as /saɪnɪaɪ/ (sounds like “signy-eye” instead of “sign-eye”).
Does this reflect an authentic Arabic or Hebrew pronunciation of the name, or is it just a variant in English that I hadn’t heard before?
Not Arabic. In Arabic it is pronounced with two syllables. Anyone pronouncing the first syllable “sign” is Anglicizing it, as no other language spells the Long-I sound with a singl lletter I. Once a word gets an Anglicization, it doomed forever to whatever error anybody’s language wishes to impart to it.
I’ve heard it with three syllables but never signy-eye. I’ve heard sigh-a-nie.
Same here. “Sigh-uh-nigh” is not an uncommon pronunciation of “Sinai,” in my experience, but I’ve never heard “signy-eye.”
You could give it 3 syllables in Arabic if you pronounce the short vowel ending (which is technically there, but almost always gets omitted in practice): سيناءُ Sīnā’[sup]u[/sup] pronounced [siː.naː.ʔu]—although that way the extra syllable is tacked onto the end, not in the middle.
This is a bit of a tangent, but what is the story with omitting vowel endings?
In Hebrew (both biblical and modern) it is two syllables: see-nigh (rhymes with “see night”).
Schama’s accent is a most curious construct. It is his own variety of English, affected to suit his academic and television persona.
Same thing as with French, with a lot of English toponims or as with, say, Andalusian (which depending on who you ask is a group of Spanish dialects, or its own language*). People are, by definition, lazy (or efficient, but this has more syllables): if they can get understood with less phonemes, they will drop phonemes.
Excellent question.
In Classical Arabic, they’re pronounced only when followed immediately by another word in the same breath. In “pausal form,” when you stop to take a breath, or like at a semicolon or end of a sentence, they’re not pronounced.
The short vowel endings exist because they are the grammatical case endings. They come into play in Classical Arabic poetry, when they’re needed to count as syllables for the scansion of the meter, and in Qur’ān recitation or for singing Classical Arabic songs or chanting rhythmically. Otherwise, in Modern Standard Arabic (the contemporary literary language that is a modernized and slightly simplified form of Classical Arabic), people just ignore them in ordinary prose speech. But when the final vowel is long, it gets pronounced always.
I don’t have an answer as to where it comes from, but I too have heard the “signy-eye” pronunciation. It’s the way the frighteningly erudite ex-vicar of my church does it, so I presume there’s A Very Good Reason. But I’ve no idea what it is.
It is called I3arab and this is not quite accurate.
The final voweling (harakat) for these are markers in the formal Arabic, the modern or the classic, of the nominative, the genetive and the accusative cases.
One does pronounce them in very formal usage, but it must be said that very few, almost only literature professors, can do this in a fluid fashion in speech.
It is much more normal to speak “meskoun” - which is without the I3rab - because it takes grammatical mastery to get it right and also in no spoken dialect is it in existence, and since few people master well even the formal in its pure form, and it is a feature that does not exist (and not for a very long time if ever) in the spoken dialect…
Newsreaders who are reading the prepared text often use it, but normally for free speech in formal arabic one does not. It sounds, in any case, very stilted and strange, like you are trying to speak poetry rather than speak normally. Or like one of those language students who comes up to you and speaks like a book… :^)
This amuses. As it is also the feature of my dialect, and the Maghrebi arab dialects in general, they are war with the vowels, which are a bourgeois luxury for the lazy easterners and should be repressed, unless they are indulged in. Perhaps the Andalousi have not entirely had their maghrebi instincts repressed… ;^)
Interesting. Is your vicar also English? If so, that’s a second example of an erudite English person using this unusual pronunciation, which makes me think there must be a Reason, even if not necessarily a Very Good one.
The reason is that in the anglicised transliteration there are three vowel, one before the ‘n’ and two after it, and the speakers are assuming that each vowel is suposed to be voiced, though the particular values that they assign to each vowel do see a bit arbitrary.
Right or wrong, this strikes me as much more defensible than the “sigh-a-nie” and “sigh-uh-nigh” pronunciations mentioned in posts #3 and #4. I don’t see how you can either of those out of “Sinai”.
Me too. It’s easy to see how that could happen - the “sigh”* in Sinai, in English, is a dipthong which is really sigh-a/sigh-ə put together into one dipthong plus the consonant. And it’s slightly easier to say than two short dipthongs next to each other, as in sigh-nigh. I’m sure there are some words in English with two short dipthongs in quick succession but they’re not common.
(Someone will instantly come up with examples I hadn’t thought of - I’d say check that they’re actually two short dipthongs in succession first, but, still, there must be some).
*(In this context I think -igh is fine, since without a preceding vowel it’s always
pronounced the same way).
Mix
Flick
Pick
Tin
Income
Rivet
An ‘i’ on its on, with no preceding vowel, is normally not pronounced ‘-igh’. Or did I misunderstand you?
I do not know about its correctness, or faithfulness to Arabic or Hebrew, or (if it is not so faithful) its origin, but I think the pronunciation described in the OP - something like sign-yai - is common in Britain. Indeed, it how I would probably say it myself. I do know that the BBC is traditionally very careful about pronunciations of foreign words, and I probably learned my pronunciation from BBC newsreaders. I sort of assumed that it was because the n was to be pronounced as if it had a tilde. (I don’t think I have ever heard “sigh-a-nie”.)
Dictionary.com gives the following pronunciation options: “sahy-nahy, sahy-nee-ahy” or, in IPA “saɪ naɪ, saɪ niˌaɪ”. I don’t read IPA, and their non-IPA version does not make much sense to me, but, either way, it appears that saying it either with or without the extra vowel after the n is established English usage.
Not strictly, but his university experiences appear to have been primarily English ones, so I think that is the connection.
I actually find it rather grating since it makes no sense to me (where’s the extra I - THERE IS NO I! aargh)- fortunately, the word isn’t one that crops up all that much, even in a Christian sermon context. So I can just grit my teeth and practise patience…