0.6 No Vowels Written — Epoché
What you will be able to do Say what an Arabic word on an ordinary page actually tells you, and what it leaves for you to supply. Read the three letters ك , ت , ب standing together and list five different words they could be. Use the sentence around a word to settle which of those words it is, the way an Arabic reader does. Recognise that this is a feature of the writing system and not a gap in it, and stop reading it as a problem. Explain why the next two lessons are about small marks above and below the line. Prerequisites : 0.5 (the emphatic letters) This is the lesson where Arabic stops looking like a harder alphabet and starts looking like a different idea about what writing is for. Everything so far has been shapes: twenty-eight letters, four forms each, six that will not join forwards, dots that separate one letter from another, and five emphatics that sound to an English ear like their plain partners. All of that is learnable in a fortnight. What follows is the thing that actually decides whether you can read Arabic, and it is not hard in the sense of being intricate. It is hard in the sense of being unfamiliar. What the page leaves out Arabic writes the consonants and the long vowels. It does not write the short vowels. It does not mark where a consonant is doubled, and it does not mark the absence of a vowel either. All of those things exist in the spoken language and all of them change the meaning of words, but the ordinary printed page — a newspaper, a novel, a road sign, a text message — simply does not record them. English does something faintly comparable in shorthand and in text messages: txt , mgmt , bldg . You read those instantly, and you do not experience them as puzzles, because you are not decoding letter by letter. You recognise a familiar shape and your mouth supplies the rest. That is exactly the skill Arabic asks for, except that it asks for it all the time, for every word, and it asks a beginner to do it before the shapes are familiar. Notice what this means about the order in which you learn things. In English you can sound out a word you have never met and get its pronunciation approximately right without knowing what it means. In Arabic you often cannot. To read a word aloud correctly you have to have already decided which word it is, and to decide which word it is you usually have to understand the sentence. Reading and understanding are not two steps here. They are one step, and that is why the course spends eighteen lessons on how words are built rather than on lists of vocabulary. How the letters work Take the three letters ك , ت and ب . Joined up in that order, right to left, they make one written word: كتب Three letters — k-t-b — one shape, and not one vowel in sight. An Arabic reader meeting that shape does not have a single answer to read out. They have a small set of answers, and they pick from it. Here are five of them. Read as Say It means كَتَبَ kataba he wrote كُتِبَ kutiba it was written كَتَّبَ kattaba he had it written, he made someone write كُتُب kutub books كُتَّاب kuttab a Quran school, and also writers Read down the first column and look at what is changing. The three letters never move. What changes is the small marks that have appeared above and below them, and in one case a doubling of the middle letter. Those marks are the short vowels, and they are the subject of lesson 0.7. On the page in front of an Arabic reader they are not there at all. The five words share one spelling. Two of those five are not even the same part of speech. Kataba is a verb in the past; kutub is a plural noun. So the shape does not merely leave the pronunciation open. It leaves open whether you are looking at an action or at a thing. It is not a riddle in practice Put the shape in a sentence and the openness collapses at once. These four are real sentences from a public corpus, printed exactly as they were written, which is to say without any vowel marks. Sentence Translation كتب التقرير. [1] He wrote the report. كتبت الرسالة. [2] The letter was written. تلك كتبهم. [3] Those books are theirs. المكتب مكسور. [4] This desk is broken. In the first, the three letters stand alone at the head of the sentence and a definite noun follows. A plural noun cannot behave that way here, so the word is the verb: he wrote. In the second, an ending has been added to the same three letters and the subject that follows is the thing written, not the person writing; that is the passive. In the third, the letters carry a possessive ending meaning their , and their wrote is not a phrase in any language, so we are looking at the noun: their books. In the fourth, an extra letter has joined the front of the group and the word means a desk or an office. Each decision took a fraction of a second and none of it required the vowels. It required knowing what kinds of word can stand where. That knowledge is grammar, and this is the honest reason the course front-loads it. Two more skeletons The same thing happens with every set of consonants in the language. Here is a second one, made of ع , ل and م , which is worth meeting because two of its readings turn up constantly and are nothing like each other. Read as Say It means عِلْم ilm knowledge, learning, a science عَلَم alam a flag عَلِمَ alima he knew, he found out عَلَّمَ allama he taught Now look at what that does to real writing. The first two rows both appear on the page with the definite article in front and nothing else to tell them apart, and both of these sentences are in the corpus. Sentence Translation العلم قوة. [5] Knowledge is power. اترك العلم الجزائري. [6] Keep the Algerian flag. Identical spelling for the word in the middle; knowledge in one and a flag in the other. What resolves it is not the letters. It is that one sentence is a proverb about power and the other is an instruction about a national flag. An Arabic reader does not hesitate over this for a moment, and neither will you once the vocabulary is in place, because the