Browsing by Author "Muraad Hameed Abdullah"

The current research mainly falls in applied linguistics, or more accurately in contrastive studies. In studying the phonetic systems of the interfacing languages, Arabic and English, the study adopts a descriptive approach when touching on particular contrastive issues. The study focuses on these two languages and provides the reader with a comprehensive description of both aspects of similarities and differences between them in the area in question. It starts with describing the phonetic system of each language with a view of putting a finger on the similarities and differences between the two systems. It has been shown that there are a number of issues that might catch the researcher’s and/or the learner’s attention when trying to learn one of these languages, i.e. Arabic or English. It has been shown that in order to learn any language, one may adopt a contrastive approach as a learning method. Further, s/he needs to distinguish between a comparative approach and a contrastive one in terms of content and application. Contrastive studies, as the current study has shown, are not new, but rather they have been used by Arabs for ages. There are a number of differences between the phonetic system of Arabic and that of English. It has been shown that the phonetic system of Arabic is not as clear and rigorous as that of English, but rather it has some sort of ambiguity in terms of the origin of some phonetic -related issues - it sometimes relies on opinions of some Western scholars. Despite that, the opinions of some Arab scholars, such as Al-Khalil and Sibawah are the cornerstones of phonetics in general and on which some Western scholars relied on their analysis. In addition, it is easy to learn how to spell Arabic words compared to English that has a sophisticated system of dictation.