Word Fun & the Many Avatars of Qaf & Kaf

I mistakenly thought that shobe (شوب), the word used for, "hot" (as in, temperature) in the Levant was a corruption of the French chaude. It turns out that the word is pure Arabic. It appears in the Qur'an (Al-Saffat, 67) as لشوبا من حميم meaning, "a mixture of boiling water." Thus, the original meaning of shobe is, "mixture", but since it was used in the Qur'an in the context of one of the hot punishments of Hell, it became used to mean hot. One of the words for honey is shobe, either because it was traditionally mixed in things or because wax is often mixed in with it. The Arabs say, ما عنده شوب و لا روب meaning, "He has neither honey nor culture (i.e. milk)."

Another interesting word is bizr (بزر), a term used here in Jordan for salted, roasted seeds that people with nothing better to do split open and eat the contents of. I thought it was just a mispronunciation of bidhr (بذر), meaning seed, since people of the Levant and Egypt often pronounce the Arabic letter dhal (ذ) as z. Mu3jam Maqayees Al-Lughah indicates that bizr is, in fact, correct, as is bidhr. (There is one scholar quoted that says that bizr is wrong, but the author of the Mu3jam doesn't seem to agree with him.) The word bidhr is related to casting something about and is related to the word tabdheer (تبذير), which means, "waste."

Qaf is a strange beast in these lands. The pronunciations for it are:

1. The Qur'anic qaf, used by scholars, pedants, foreigners, and native speakers on occasions when any other pronunciation just sounds wrong. For example, the words, "Qur'an" and "Al-Qahira" (Cairo) are almost always pronounced with the Qur'anic qaf. This pronunciation is also used by one of the North-West African countries, possibly Algeria or Morocco.
   
2. Gaf. This is used by almost all native Jordanian dialects, many rural Palestinians, and most Arabs in their colloquial speech.
   
3. Kaf. This is used by some Palestinian peasants.
4. Glottal stop (hamza). This is used by city slickers of the Levant and Egypt.
5. Jaf. The only person I've heard do this is my mother-in-law, a former tent-dweller of the Bani Hassan tribe. She doesn't do it consistently, though. She'll say something like wajif juddam to mean, "standing in front of." This actually does have a basis in older Arabic as one of the Companions said that qistas (قسطاس) was the Roman word for, "justice." Also, the Arabic words qar7 (قرح) and jar7 (جرح) are close in meaning.

As for kaf, it also has some strangeness:

1. There are those who pronounce it chaf consistently except in the case of pronouns, in which case it's used only for the second-person singular female pronoun. In all other pronouns, it's pronounced kaf. This is the way my mother-in-law uses it. I believe rural Palestinians would have similar usage, but I'm not sure.
   
2. There are those who only pronounce it chaf in the case of the second-person singular female pronoun, and possibly to a much lesser extent in a few other words, ochay?

Overall, the usage of chaf in any of its forms seems limited to: Northern Jordan, rural Palestine, and Iraq. The Southern Jordanians certainly don't use it.