I was listening to the song, Jogging A Tombouctou by Zap Mama off the album Seven. There are several parts when the vocalists are singing in Arabic and every word that starts with ‘M’ sounds like it start with ‘Mwaa.’ As in, “Love Ya, Dahling, Mwaa!”
Is that something they are doing as an affectation or is there a common phoneme in Arabic that has the sound, ‘Mwaah’ or is it some combination of the two?
My wife is a native Egyptian Arabic speaker and I’ve never heard that sound. :dubious: Someone else may weight in with experience in other dialects, though.
News Flash: “Love Ya, Dahling, Mwaa!” is not Arabic. That mwaa sound reminds me of that fakey kissing sound people make. :rolleyes:
An Arab who heard a Beatles album might ask, “Is ob-la-di-ob-la-da a sound in English?” 
A brilliant bit of ignorance fighting that!
Mwaa is not an Arabic … uh … phoneme. In an instance where you might here that in Arabic speech it would most likely be a combination of sounds.
Aaaaaaand now I’ve got an image of Arabs with knives at the foot of the bed saying, “Mwaaa-ha-ha-ha!”
I’m not sure what else to call it… a sound? Is it a sound in Arabic? Do people in Arabic speaking countries pucker up and get really close like they’re going to kiss then pull away and go Mwaa? I figure it’s a sound that can be made in Arabic or any other language.
I just wondered whether it was something they were exaggerating or if it was purely made up for the song.
Arabs don’t kiss, they don’t even pretend to. That is a blasphemous Western convention. In Arabic you might hear something that sounds like “mwa” but it would be a combination of 3 or 4 sounds/letters such as what makes people say Moamar Qdaffi or mo"lm. But a sustained “Mwaa” all by itelf? la.
I found a thirty-second sound clip on Amazon. Great music, but the voice and the sound in general seem to have been distorted for effect. Hard to tell what is meant by the Mwaa sound, which I definitely hear.
In Arabic it could be the slurred beginning of words like موافقة muwâfaqah ‘agreement’ or مواصلة muwâsalah ‘connection’.
Hey! How did you type in Arabic?
So, a better analogoy than “ob-la-di ob-la-da” might be, “Give it away” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers?
Character Map.
Any chance it could be French moi, even if it means nothing in conext? I noticed the song’s title is partly in French (“a Tomboctou”).
Oui, he was saying “Baise-moi,” but the dirty word was deleted, leaving only the pronoun, in the most suggestive grammatical case, the direct object…
It’s the sound made by a dying giraffe.
French is a definite possiblity, there are several songs on the album that have french lyrics.
I hate having to ask this-- being whooshed is so humiliating-- but, are you serious?
Oh my God, how did they get in here?
I thought we were safe home in England!
Not a whoosh–Allowing my whimsy to speculate freely on how a French word could have gotten worked into the song’s context… bordelond offered the suggestion and I tried to make it work. It was a whimsical attempt because frankly I don’t know what the song intended to say, I haven’t even heard it. If somebody would please give us an audio video URL for it.
Haven’t looked for video … but you can click on the speaker icon next to the song title here to hear about 30 seconds of "Jogging À Tombouctou ".