10 Comments
There is actually no suffix!? Or do you mean the Harakat ( َ / ِ / ُ )? Those are no suffixes but short vowel marks. In this case I guess they want to make clear that the pronunciation is "Dawuud". However, I don't understand what kind of name دَوود is supposed to be anyway. For David I know دَاوُود/دَاؤُود/دَاوُد in classical Arabic or دايفيد/ديفيد/دافيد when talking about the English David (like e.g. ديفيد بوي - David Bowie). I have never read دَوود before. But maybe some native can help!
2247
I agree with you. I'm native, and I have never seen دَوود either. The most common spelling is دَاوُد. The course makers should change to that spelling instead, especially that the text-to-speech engine would pronounce دَاوُد better.
Thanks for confirming, Samir! I just started to check the new Arabic course and there are actually a lot of mistakes to be corrected - especially when it comes to wrong Taschkil/Harakat/Tanwin.
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Yeah, all courses start out with several mistakes. It's challenging enough to create a course that teaches a language close to English, and Arabic is even more challenging, not only because it's very different, but also because of all the different variations and lack of experience with diacritics, even from native speakers, because they're often dropped.
Yes, I guess it's difficult to create a course for a difficult language like Arabic. However, I'd rather prefer Duolingo to omit diacritics completely (like they did with their Hebrew course) over teaching wrong ones.
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They’re not trying to teach wrong ones, it will just take some time to fix all the mistakes :-)
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The faster pronunciation seems to add a sufix on Dawuud, which personal names should not have.
I guess because a person is always definite in Arabic (and probably most other languages!?). As in Arabic the adjective always follows the noun and it must agree with it in definiteness, number, gender and case, "generous David" would be something like "دَاوُد الكَريم"
