A Common Mispronunciation: Village vs. Disbelief

According to Lisan Al-Arab, the word kafr, meaning, "village" is Syriac in origin and is most commonly used for small villages named after individuals in the Levant. It is not surprising then, that one finds cities in Northern Jordan and Syria named this way. However, one of my peeves is the way the locals pronounce the word as kufr (meaning, "disbelief") instead of kafr. (In Arabic, short vowels are not normally written, but local pronunciation and transliteration renders it kufr.) One does not find this mispronunciation in Egypt: over there, it is Kafr El-Sheikh, Kafr Abdu, and Kafr El-Zayyat.

This mispronunciation of the a is not limited to the word kafr. Rather, one finds people in the Levant saying yokel ("he eats") instead of yakul and the Syrians will even say mughrib instead of maghrib. The interesting thing is that the active participle of Arabic is fa'il while the active participle of Hebrew is po'el. (The, "f" and "p" sounds are often interchanged in many languages.) Is it possible that this Levantine pronunciation of a as o has its origins in the native Semitic language spoken here before the arrival of Arabic?