Reading Arabic

Arabic script is bafflingly unfamiliar to people used to the Roman alphabet in its various forms, so few tourists realise that a little effort to understand it can bring disproportionate rewards. In some respects written Arabic is the lingua franca of the Arab world – the pronunciation of spoken Arabic varies significantly between countries and across classes, and there is no universally agreed way of transliterating spoken (or written) Arabic into a Romanised equivalent, but printed Arabic is universally recognised. Put this to the test by comparing the response to a question uttered in the speech equivalent suggested by your phrase book with the response when you indicate the written Arabic version in your phrasebook – nine times out of ten, bafflement will be followed by illumination.

Linguata places the emphasis on listening to and repeating a reasonably accessible form of spoken Arabic, but it also supplies the written form, which the following notes will help you decipher, should you wish to do so.

Some points to bear in mind: Arabic runs from right to left; the short vowels a i u are usually not represented and have to be inferred from the context; there are no capital letters; there is no indefinite article (a, an); the definite article (the) merges with the word it defines; the majority of letters have two forms, a short and a long (see below).

Printed Arabic is based on written Arabic so most of its letters are joined up; it is also like a kind of shorthand in which many of the letters have abbreviated forms which occur in the beginning and middle of words. The full forms occur at the end of words or when the letter is written on its own.

The Arabic Alphabet

The Arabic alphabet consists of 28 consonants, three of which can have a long vowel function. If short vowel sounds are represented they are indicated by four small signs above or below the consonant which the vowel sound follows. These are the harakat, three small strokes corresponding to ‘a’, ‘i’ and ‘u’, and a small circle, sukuun (‘quiescence’) which indicates that no vowel follows the consonant. In practice they are usually omitted (Linguata follows this convention for the Arabic text but vowel sounds are fully represented in the Romanised text, where the emphasis is on providing an aid to memorising sounds rather than a strictly equivalent version of the Arabic text).

The Linguata articles use the following conventions to indicate particular sounds:

Arabic Letters: Transliteration, Sounds and Forms

Footnote: The pronunciation of ‘ayn is described as a voiced version of ḥā and likened to the ‘r’ in French Marie without the back of the throat contact. Its distinctiveness varies between speakers, some using it more lightly so that it functions like a glottal stop.

Graham Rooth

References and Recommended Reading