An overview of phonological interactions in Judeo-Baghdadi Arabic

Judeo-Baghdadi Arabic is an endangered Jewish variety of Arabic (Semitic) spoken in Israel by Jews who immigrated from Baghdad. In this paper, we provide an overview of the phonological system of this variety, focusing on the interactions between its supra-segmental phonological processes. In particular, we describe new instances of opaque interactions that are known to pose a challenge to classical Optimality Theory and to some of its extensions that have been proposed to deal with opacity. In addition, we highlight an extreme case of opacity which we call “across-the-board opacity”, involving an opaque process whose regular application is never observed on the surface, raising the question of how a process of this sort would be acquired.