0.7 Harakat: The Vowel Marks — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the four vowel marks by name and say what each one sounds like. Tell at a glance whether a mark sits above or below the letter, and know which letter it belongs to. Read a short marked word aloud correctly the first time you see it. Write a long vowel as a mark plus a letter, and say why the long ones are the only vowels the page keeps. Say where marked Arabic is actually printed, and why this course prints it for two phases and then stops. Prerequisites : 0.6 (what the page leaves out) The last lesson showed you the hole: three letters on a page can be five words, because the short vowels are not written. This lesson shows you the notation that fills the hole in. It is small — four signs — and once you have it you can be handed a marked word you have never met and read it aloud correctly, which is something you cannot yet do. The marks are called harakat , from a word meaning movement, because they set the letter moving from one sound into the next. A letter with no mark is standing still. How the letters work A mark is not a letter and does not take up a place on the line. It is drawn above or below the letter it belongs to, and the letters keep joining underneath it exactly as they did before. So a marked word has the same skeleton as an unmarked one; nothing about the joining changes. The rule about which letter a mark belongs to is simple and it is the opposite of what English readers expect. The mark on a letter is the vowel that comes after that letter, not before it. A consonant plus its mark is one syllable, read in that order. So the mark above the first letter of a word gives you the first vowel of the word, and you read consonant then vowel, consonant then vowel, from right to left. Say that rule out loud once. Almost every early misreading comes from taking a mark as the vowel before its letter. The four marks There are three vowel marks and one mark for the absence of a vowel. The shapes are tiny, so look at where each one sits as much as at what it looks like. Name Where it sits Sound On the letter beh fatha a short stroke slanting above the letter a short a, roughly as in English cat or cut بَ kasra the same stroke, below the letter a short i, roughly as in English bit بِ damma a small loop above the letter a short u, roughly as in English put بُ sukun a small circle above the letter no vowel at all; the letter closes the syllable قَلْب Three things are worth noticing about that table before you go on. The first is that fatha and kasra are the same stroke, and the only difference between them is which side of the letter it is on. Above means a, below means i. That is the whole distinction, and it carries an enormous amount of the language: it is the difference between a past verb and a noun, between an active participle and a passive one, and between the two most common little words in Arabic. The second is that damma looks like a small version of the letter و , and that is not a coincidence. The short u is written with a miniature of the letter that carries the long u, and the same idea applies to fatha, which is a shrunken ا lying on its side. The system is internally consistent once you see it that way. The third is that sukun is not a vowel and not a sound. It is an explicit statement that there is nothing here. English has no equivalent, because English never needs to say that a consonant is bare; Arabic does, because a bare consonant is what closes a syllable, and whether a syllable is closed decides where the stress falls. That is lesson 1.4. Three vowels, and that is the whole set Arabic has three vowel qualities. Not five, not the eleven or so that English has. Just a, i and u. Every vowel in the language is one of those three, either short or long. For an English speaker this is the single most welcome fact in the course, and it needs saying plainly because it will not feel true at first. It will not feel true because the three vowels shift a good deal depending on their neighbours: next to one of the emphatic letters from lesson 0.5 the a is pulled back and darkened until it sounds like the vowel in father , and next to a throat letter it darkens too. Those are not extra vowels. They are the same three vowels wearing coats, and nobody writes them differently because to an Arabic ear they are not different. What matters instead — and it matters much more than in English — is length . Long and short are separate vowels in Arabic in the way that b and p are separate consonants in English. Getting the length wrong does not give you an accent; it gives you a different word. Lesson 1.1 drills this. The notation for it is the next section. Long and short A long vowel is written as the mark plus a letter. The mark says which of the three vowels it is, and the letter that follows says it is the long one. This is why the long vowels survive on an unmarked page and the short ones do not: the long ones are half letter, and letters are always written. Short Long The long one adds the letter A word with it بَ بَا alif كِتَاب بِ بِي ya مَدِينَة بُ بُو waw مَكْتُوب Hold the long ones for about twice as long as the short ones and you will be close enough to be understood. Do not change their quality, only their length; the temptation for an English speaker is to turn a long i into the diphthong of my or a long u into the diphthong of go , and both of those are wrong. A long i in Arabic is the vowel of machine held; a long u is the vowel of rule held. Now look back at the third column of that table and at the last column of the alphabet table in lesson 0.1. The three letters that carry the long vowels are the same three that were described there as doing double duty, and two of the three are in the group that never joins forwards. So a long vowel often breaks the word into visible pieces, which is one more reason a gap inside an Arabic word is not a word boundary. What the marks are worth Here are four spellings that are genuinely two words each.