0.4 Letters That Differ Only by Dots — Epoché
What you will be able to do Name the eight groups of Arabic letters that share a body and differ only in their dots. Say how many dots a letter has and whether they sit above or below, without hesitating. Read a run of teeth by taking the bodies first and the dots second. Recognise the printed and handwritten habits that make two dots look like one dash. Tell apart the pairs that English speakers most often read as the same letter. Prerequisites : 0.3, where the six letters that never join forwards were named and the gaps inside a word were explained. By now you have met the dots three times. In the alphabet of 0.1 several rows looked suspiciously alike. In the four shapes of 0.2 Script , five letters turned out to share one tooth and differ by nothing else in three of their four positions. In 0.3, four of the six non-joining letters came in two pairs distinguished by a single dot. It is time to treat this properly, because it is not a handful of coincidences. It is how the Arabic alphabet is built. Fifteen of the twenty-eight letters share their body with at least one other letter. The bodies you actually have to draw number about sixteen; the alphabet gets to twenty-eight by adding one, two or three dots above or below. That is a deliberate economy, and once you see it the alphabet becomes much smaller than twenty-eight letters. It also means that the dots carry an enormous load, and that a missing or misplaced dot changes the word rather than blurring it. English has nothing quite comparable, which is why the habit has to be built from scratch. The nearest thing is the dot on an i, and English speakers are used to treating that dot as decoration: handwriting that leaves it out is still readable. In Arabic the dots are not decoration. They are the letter. How the letters work Three facts about the dots hold everywhere, and knowing all three in advance makes the table below shorter than it looks. The count is one, two or three, and never more. No Arabic letter carries four dots. If you think you are looking at four, you are looking at two letters, or at two dots belonging to one letter and a dot belonging to its neighbour. The position is above or below, never beside. A letter's dots all sit on the same side of the body, so you never have to work out a pattern; you only have to look up or look down. Three of the letters in this lesson take their dots below, and all the rest take them above. The dots belong to the body they touch. In a run of joined teeth this is the only thing that keeps them sorted, and in tight print it is genuinely hard. The rule for your eye is that a dot sits over the middle of its own tooth, not over the join between two teeth. The table gives the eight groups. Read the letters of each group from the right, and check the dots against the description before you look at the sounds. Group The letters, right to left Where the dots go What they sound like 1 ب ت ث one below, two above, three above b, t, and the th of thing 2 ج ح خ one below, none at all, one above the j of jam, a hard h squeezed in the throat, and the ch of Scottish loch 3 د ذ none, then one above d, and the th of this 4 ر ز none, then one above a tapped r, and z 5 س ش none, then three above s, and sh 6 ص ض none, then one above an emphatic s, and an emphatic d 7 ط ظ none, then one above an emphatic t, and an emphatic th as in this 8 ع غ none, then one above a voiced squeeze in the throat, and a gargled g close to a French r Two remarks on the table before we go on. The first is that groups 3 to 8 all follow the same shape of rule: one letter bare, its partner with a single dot above. Six groups, one rule, and you have covered twelve letters. Only groups 1 and 2 need more attention, and group 1 is the one you already met in 0.2. The second is that the table is not quite the whole story, because there is a ninth pair that belongs here even though it is not in the list above. The letter for f and the letter for a deep k share a body too: a loop with a tail, carrying one dot above for f and two for the deep k. They also differ slightly in the shape of the tail, which is why they are usually taught apart, but when the dots are unclear the pair behaves exactly like the eight groups above. Add them to your list. The bodies you actually have to learn Turn the alphabet inside out and look at the bodies rather than the letters. This is the view that makes the script small, and it is worth memorising in this form. The body The letters that share it Told apart by a tooth sitting on the line ب ت ث ن ي the dots, in the first three positions; at the end of a run the last two take bowls of their own a pointed hook over a deep bowl ج ح خ the dots alone, in every position a small angled hook on the line د ذ one dot above a stroke curving below the line ر ز one dot above three small teeth and a wide tail س ش three dots above a closed loop with a tooth and a tail ص ض one dot above a loop with an upright standing on it ط ظ one dot above a ring opening to the right with a tail ع غ one dot above a closed loop with a tail ف ق one dot above against two, and the depth of the tail Nine bodies account for twenty-one letters. The seven that are left over have bodies of their own, which is why they were never a problem: the upright stroke, the two shapes of the m and the l, the loop of the h, the loop of the w, and the two shapes that were already unique. Learn the nine and you have learned the difficult three quarters. How to read dots without counting them The mistake every beginner makes is to read the dots first. Your eye lands on a word, notices a scatter of marks, tries to attach each mark to a body, and stalls. The order has to be the other way around, and this is a habit that can be trained deliberately in about a week. Bodies first, in silence. Look at the run and count the bodies without naming anything. Three teeth and a bowl. A hook, a loop, a tail. Only when the frame is settled should you look up and down for the dots.