Standard Lemma guide
Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.
Sound
Each Play button uses your device's default local English voice, or a natural local fallback. The selected voice name appears after playback. This is synthesized speech, not a source recording.
noun
a sound change in Arabic by which the vowels /a/, /aː/ are fronted in certain phonetic environments (possibly creating new phonemes, notably in Maltese and to a lesser degree in some dialects)
Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract
Usage: uncountable, usually
Topics: human-sciences, linguistics, phonetics, phonology, sciences
No example sentence was provided for this meaning.
Synonyms: none provided
Antonyms: none provided
History
From Arabic إمالة (ʔimāla, literally “inclination”). The earliest form of the process, described by the Arab grammarians, was conditioned on the existence of an /i/ before or after the /a/ (somewhat similarly to Germanic umlaut). Hence the /a/ was said to “incline” towards the /i/. In many modern dialects, however, imala is only conditioned by surrounding consonants, and it is typically hindered by certain adjacent consonants (especially emphatics).
