There is something that drives me crazy! Traditionally, linguists who research the allegedly varieties of Arabic, always romanize & transcribe the pronunciations accordingly to Classical Arabic pronunciation. All of that is because of the notion that all the allegedly spoken varieties in North Africa & West Asia, should be Arabic & Arabic vowels should be /a, u, i/, so I even see in the French Wiktionary it is written phonemically as /imta/! Those people don't understand Egyptian very well. They don't understand that Egyptians differenciate bettween [ɑ] & [æ], so the difference should be noted, even with the broader phonemic transcription with slashes. If we didn't differentiate between [ɑ] & [æ] or only pronounced one of them, then it would have been OK to transcribe it with /a/
English language also has varieties of pronunciations of, for example, [æ] in "anger", but however, it is typed phonemically with its broader transcription of its main pronunciation as /æ/, not[eə] or [iə] as some would pronounce it.
There is a tradition for linguists to transcribe the allegedly varieties of Arabic with the supposedly (Modern Standard) Arabic vowels |a, u, i| & there arises the problem :( --Dudi22:48, 15 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
