Michael Peverett: ways to write words

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

ways to write words

Common Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) looking frothy

It was always going to be a spartan trip, because we bought Economy Light tickets ( = no hold baggage). But it became more so on our first evening in Dubai, when I left my smartphone in a taxi, and it never came back, so I spent the whole week away from the internet with merely the lustrous city (at the beginning of Ramadan), Read and Write Arabic Script , and an emergency mini-volume of Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece.

Languages that were only recently literate have tended to adopt the Roman or other major alphabets. But languages with long literary traditions preserve their own alphabets... or scripts... or let's just say, ways to write words. Arabic is definitely a script. Yes, it has an alphabet of twenty or so characters, but the alphabet isn't enough to know how to read or write a word. You have to know how to combine the letters together. There are no capital letters. Whether letters are joined or disjoined is not a matter for personal taste. The invisible "line of writing" is of great importance.

A word is itself a complex line. Its breaks and its outlying dots and squiggles are all part of it.

The same alphabetical letter may have several forms, depending on where it appears within the word (at the beginning, in the middle, at the end). The end form is usually also the "full" form, the one you use when the letter stands alone.

Words and sentences are parsed right to left, but numbers (in figures) are parsed left to right (from an English perspective).

Some consonants are dark (tongue lowered to base of mouth) and this changes the vowel sounds around them. . Other sounds not in Standard English include gutturals, glottal stops, a back K, and a heavy (blown) H.

There is no sound equivalent to English P or V. There are comparatively few vowel sounds. No short -e or -o (eg "get", "got") and no "awe" or "air" or "oy" or "ear".

The consonants are either "sun" or "moon" letters. Sun letters are formed with the tongue tip and assimilate the definite article "al" when pronounced; moon letters don't. Thus the pronunciation is "al-bayt" (the house) because b is a moon letter, but "ar-rial" (the rial) because r is a sun letter. The spelling of "al" is unaffected.