0.3 The Six That Never Connect — Epoché
What you will be able to do Name the six letters that never join to the letter after them, and recognise each one on sight. Explain why a single Arabic word can appear on the page in two, three or four separate pieces. Find the end of a word by the width of the gap rather than by the presence of a gap. Say, for any of the six, what shape the letter after it will take. Read short words aloud without splitting them into imaginary words. Prerequisites : 0.2, where the four shapes of a letter were shown to be one body with joining strokes added and removed. The lesson on the four shapes, 0.2 Script , ended with a word that arrived in two pieces, and promised an explanation. Here it is. Six of the twenty-eight letters can be joined to from the right but never join on to what follows. When one of them appears in the middle of a word, the joined run stops there. The next letter has to start a fresh run, and a visible gap opens up inside the word. This is the second thing that makes a real Arabic page look impossible to a beginner, and unlike the four shapes it is not a matter of surprise but of arithmetic. A word of five letters containing three of the six will be written in four pieces. Your eye, trained on English, reads every gap as a word boundary, so it sees four words where there is one. The count is wrong before you have even begun to read, and everything downstream of the count is wrong too. The repair is small and reliable. Arabic does put a gap between words, and it is wider than the gap inside a word. The signal is there on every page; you simply have not been told to look for the width rather than the gap. This lesson gives you the six letters so that you can predict where the narrow gaps will fall, and then trains the eye on the difference. How the letters work Every one of the twenty-eight letters joins backwards, to the letter on its right. Twenty-two of them also join forwards, to the letter on their left, and those twenty-two have the four shapes of lesson 0.2. The remaining six join backwards only. Because they never join forwards, they have no shape that runs on to the left, which means they have only two shapes rather than four: the independent one, and a final one that takes an incoming stroke from the right. That is worth pausing on, because it is a discount. Six letters out of twenty-eight cost you two shapes instead of four. The six are also among the most frequent letters in the language, so a large fraction of what you read is made of the cheap ones. The last column of the table gives a word in which the letter sits in the middle, so that you can see the break. Read across, and note that every one of these words is written in more pieces than an English eye expects. Name Sound Independent At the end A word with it in the middle أَلِف the long vowel aa ا ـا كِتَاب دَال d د ـد مَدِينَة ذَال th as in this ذ ـذ حِذَاء رَاء a tapped r, as in Spanish ر ـر غُرْفَة زَاي z ز ـز وَزِير وَاو w, and the long vowel uu و ـو يَوْم Two things make the six easy to hold in the memory. The first is that they come in visual families, which is useful because you have to recognise them fast: the first is a bare upright stroke; the second and third are a small hook that sits on the line, differing only in a dot above; the fourth and fifth are a longer stroke that drops below the line, again differing only in a dot above; the sixth is a loop with a tail. So there are really four shapes to know, and two dots. The second is a consequence of the rule, and it is the single most useful prediction in early Arabic reading: the letter immediately after one of the six always takes the shape it would take at the start of a word. It cannot take a medial or final shape, because there is no incoming stroke for it to receive. When you see one of the six, you know what the shape after it will be before you look at it. Reading the gaps Now the practical half. Given that gaps appear inside words, how do you find the end of a word? Three signals, in order of reliability. Width. A space between words is wider than the break after one of the six. In print this is set by the typesetter and is consistent within a page, so once you have calibrated your eye on one line you can trust it for the rest. In handwriting it is less consistent, which is one reason handwriting gets its own lesson, 0.10. The letter before the gap. If the letter to the right of a gap is one of the six, the gap may be internal. If it is not one of the six, the gap is a word boundary, because a letter that joins forwards would have joined if there were anything to join to. This turns the six from a nuisance into a test you can apply. Plausibility. A piece of one or two letters sitting alone is more often a fragment than a word, though Arabic does have very short words. Use this last and lightly; it is a guess, not a rule, and it will mislead you exactly where the previous two signals are clear. In practice the second signal does most of the work, because it is binary and because you can already run it: you know the six. Look at the letter on the right-hand side of a gap and ask whether it is one of them. If the answer is no, you have found the end of a word. One word, more than one piece The table takes three words apart. The count of pieces is the thing to check with your eye before you read the note, and the words get harder as you go down. Word Meaning Notes مَدْرَسَة ar madrasa a school Pieces 3 Where the run breaks m and d join, then d refuses to go on, so r starts a fresh run; r refuses in turn, so the last two letters form a third piece. وَرْد ar warada roses, blossom Pieces 3 Where the run breaks all three letters are from the six, so nothing joins to anything and a three-letter word is written as three separate marks. هذه وردة صفراء. Here's a yellow rose. أَوْلَاد ar children, boys Pieces 4 Where the run breaks a, then u, then l joined to the next a, then d on its own. Four pieces for one five-letter word, and not one of the gaps is a w