0.8 Shadda, Tanwin, and the Special Shapes — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read a word with a doubled consonant, and hear why the doubling has to be held. Recognise the three marks that add an n to the end of a word without writing one. Tell the two letters that hide behind familiar shapes, and say what each of them really sounds like. Find hamza whether it is standing on its own or perched on another letter, and stop mistaking its seats for vowels. Read the one compulsory ligature in Arabic, and the shape that marks a long a at the start of a word. Prerequisites : 0.7 (the vowel marks) Four marks were the main notation. Eight things are left, and after them the script holds nothing that will take you by surprise. None of the eight is difficult in itself. What makes them worth a lesson of their own is that each one is a place where a beginner reads something that is not there, or fails to read something that is, and the mistakes are all silent: nothing looks wrong, so nobody corrects you. Work through them in order. They are arranged from the one you will meet most often to the one you will meet least. How the letters work All eight belong to the system you already have. Six of them are marks, drawn above or below a letter and taking no space on the line, exactly like fatha and kasra. Two of them are letters that join and behave like any other letter, but whose shape misleads. Nothing here changes the direction of writing, the joining, or the rule that a mark gives the vowel after its letter. One warning before the list. Six of the eight are invisible on an ordinary unmarked page, in the sense that the mark is simply not printed — and that includes the doubling, which changes the word completely. So this lesson is teaching you two things at once: how to read the marks when they are there, and what to suspect when they are not. One: shadda, the doubling mark A small shape like a rounded w above a letter means that the letter is doubled. It is written once and pronounced as two, which is to say that you hold it: the consonant is drawn out, and the syllable before it is closed. This is the first mark in the course whose absence from a page can change a word into another word of a different meaning, so it is the most important of the eight. English does not do this. English writes double letters — butter , summer — and pronounces one. Arabic writes one and pronounces two, and the difference is audible and meaningful. Here is the pair to remember, from the root you already know: Word Say It means دَرَسَ darasa he studied دَرَّسَ darrasa he taught, he made someone study جَدّ jadd a grandfather جِدّ jidd seriousness, earnest effort Look at the first two. The three letters are identical and the doubling is the only difference, and it turns studying into teaching. That is not a coincidence, either: doubling the middle consonant of a root is one of the ways Arabic makes a verb causative, and the whole system of ten verb forms in the second phase is built on tricks of that kind. When the doubled letter also carries a vowel, the vowel is written with it — the two marks stack, and the vowel goes underneath or above the doubling mark. Two more words, both extremely common, show the doubling in the middle and at the end: Word Say It means سُكَّر sukkar sugar مُدَرِّس mudarris a teacher حَمَّام hammam a bathroom; a bath house أُمّ umm a mother Hold the doubled consonants when you say those. An English speaker's instinct is to touch them lightly, and the result is a different word or no word at all. Two: tanwin, an n you cannot see Three marks are made by doubling the vowel marks you already know, and each of them adds the sound n after the vowel. They only ever appear on the last letter of a word, and they are what an indefinite noun wears in careful Arabic. Mark Made by Sound at the end Example tanwin with damma two dammas un كِتَابٌ tanwin with kasra two kasras in كِتَابٍ tanwin with fatha two fathas an كِتَابًا Two practical points about that table. The first is that all three mean roughly a book rather than the book ; which of the three you use depends on the job the word is doing in the sentence, and that is the case system of the third phase. You do not have to learn it now. What you have to be able to do now is read the marks. The second is the one that catches everybody. The last row has an extra letter after the marked one: an alif that is written and not pronounced, there only to carry the tanwin. So a word ending in that combination looks a syllable longer than it sounds. Two words you will meet on the first day of speaking Arabic do exactly this, and they turn up together in one of the commonest greetings in the language: Word Say Its job أَهْلًا ahlan the first half of a greeting meaning welcome سَهْلًا sahlan the second half of it أَيْضًا aydan also, as well غَدًا ghadan tomorrow In all four, the final alif is silent. That is the greeting as it is actually written and said: Sentence Translation أهلا وسهلا! [1] Welcome! Three and four: two letters that are not what they look like Two shapes in Arabic are borrowed from other letters and behave differently from them. Both appear only at the end of a word, which is the one thing that makes them easy to spot. Shape Its name Looks like What it actually is ة ta marbuta, the tied t the letter heh with two dots over it a t that is usually not pronounced, and almost always the sign of a feminine word ى alif maqsura, the shortened alif the letter ya with its dots taken away a long a, not an i and not a y Take the tied t first, because you have already been reading it for three lessons. It is the ending on the words for school, city, library, hour, language and cat. In careful, fully pronounced Arabic it is a t; in ordinary speech, and at the end of a sentence, it is pronounced as a short a and the t disappears. So the same written word ends in a t or does not, depending on what follows it, and both are correct. For now, say the a and let the t go. Its real value to you is as a signpost. A word th