0.5 The Emphatic Letters — Epoché
What you will be able to do Name the five emphatic letters and pair each one with the plain letter it answers to. Say what emphasis is, in terms of the tongue, and what it does to the vowels next to it. Tell apart the three pairs of emphatics that share a body and differ only in a dot. Accept that you cannot yet hear the difference, and know why reading it comes first. Read the five emphatic letters in real sentences without confusing them with their plain partners. Prerequisites : 0.4, where the eight groups of letters that differ only by dots were laid out and the nine shared bodies were named. The last lesson, 0.4 Script , used a word without explaining it. Four of the eight groups ended with something called an emphatic letter, and the word was left standing as though it meant something. It does mean something exact, and this lesson unpacks it, because the emphatic letters are the place where Arabic asks an English speaker to hear a distinction that English does not make anywhere in its sound system. There are five of them: an s, a d, a t, a th and a k, each made further back in the mouth than the ordinary letter with the same description. Five letters out of twenty-eight, which does not sound like much. But they are common, they distinguish words from one another, and they colour the vowels beside them, so a page of Arabic read without them sounds wrong in a way that is hard for the reader to locate and immediately obvious to a listener. This lesson belongs to the script volume, not to the sound volume, and the difference in aim is worth stating. Here you learn to see the five letters, to pair them correctly, and to stop confusing them on the page with the letters they resemble. Producing them with your own mouth is lesson 1.3, and hearing the contrast reliably takes weeks of listening after that. Reading comes first because you cannot practise a contrast you cannot find in the text. How the letters work Start with what emphasis is, because the name is unhelpful and suggests loudness, which is not involved at all. Say the word sit , and notice where your tongue is: the front of it is close to the ridge behind your top teeth, and the body of it is fairly high and forward. Now say salt or sought , and notice that the body of the tongue has pulled back and down, and that the vowel has darkened. Arabic takes that second, retracted setting and makes it a property of the consonant itself. An emphatic letter is pronounced with the body of the tongue pulled back towards the throat and flattened, so that the space in the mouth is larger and the sound is deeper. Some speakers also narrow the throat. The technical names are velarised and pharyngealised, and you will meet them again in lesson 1.3; the useful description is the same consonant said with a dark, hollow mouth . English has this darkening, but only as an accident of what happens to be next to what. The l of feel is darker than the l of leaf , and no English speaker notices, because the difference never separates two words. In Arabic it does separate words, so it has to be heard, and it has to be written. That is the whole of the difficulty, and it is a real one: the hardest thing to learn in any language is a distinction your first language treats as noise. The table gives eight pairs. The first five are the sound contrasts, each emphatic against its plain partner. The last three are pairs that look alike on the page, which is a different problem with the same cure: know which is which before you try to say either. No. The two letters How they differ in the mouth How they differ on the page 1 ص س both are an s; the first is said with the tongue flat and the mouth dark, the second is the ordinary s of English nothing alike: a closed loop with a tail against three small teeth with a tail 2 ض د both are a d; the first is said with the tongue flat and the mouth dark, the second is the ordinary d nothing alike: a loop with a tooth and a tail against a small angled hook 3 ط ت both are a t; the first is dark and is also unaspirated, with no puff of breath after it, the second is the ordinary t nothing alike: a loop with an upright standing on it against a tooth with two dots 4 ظ ذ both are the th of this; the first is dark, the second is the ordinary one nothing alike: a loop with an upright against a small hook with one dot 5 ق ك both are a k; the first is made far back at the soft palate and darkens the vowels beside it, the second is the ordinary k nothing alike: a loop with a deep tail against an upright with a hook 6 ص ض an emphatic s against an emphatic d, so the two are not close in sound at all the same body, told apart by one dot above 7 ط ظ an emphatic t against an emphatic th, again not close in sound the same body, told apart by one dot above 8 ق ف a deep k against an f, which are nothing like each other the same loop; the first takes two dots and a deep round tail, the second one dot and a flat tail Read the last column of the first five rows again, because it contains good news that students rarely notice. The emphatic letters do not look like their plain partners. Not one of the five sound pairs is a pair on the page. So while the sounds will trouble you for months, the reading is easy from the start: you can always see which one is written, even when you cannot yet hear which one is meant. The reading problems are all in rows 6 to 8, and they are problems of dots rather than of sound. Two emphatics share one body and two more share a body with a letter from outside the set. That is why this lesson follows the lesson on dots rather than preceding it. What emphasis does to the vowels around it An emphatic consonant does not keep to itself. The retracted tongue arrives before the consonant and leaves after it, so the vowels on both sides are pulled back and down with it. This spreading is the most audible consequence of emphasis, and in practice it is how listeners identify the letter: not by the consonant, which is brief, but