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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Shi'a and Their Beliefs Transliteration In the Arabic language, there are a number of letters that do not have a corresponding equivalent in the English language. As a result the sound or pronunciation of those letters would be unfamiliar to the English reader who has not come across them before.

Some of them may easily be pronounced by the English reader, whereas s/he would find others difficult to pronounce, unless he has already been exposed to the sounds of the Arabic alphabet. The Arabic consonant characters are given below along with their equivalent English characters or sounds.

b = ب z = ز f = ف t = ت s = س q = ق th = ث sh = ش k = ك j = ج s} = ص l = ل h} = ح d} = ض m = م kh = خ t} = ط n = ن d = د d = ظ h = g dh = ذ c = ع w = و r = ر gh = غ y = ي This presentation is an effort to describe the sounds of these letters, and endeavour to explain how their sounds are generated, so that the reader may obtain some idea about these particular characters, when they appear in some Arabic terms used in this work.

To distinguish these letters, either a combination of two letters are used or, in the case of the majority of the difficult letters, a normal Latin letter is used in association with a diacritic – dot or a line above or below the letter as shown in the table above. Furthermore there are also a couple of letters in the Arabic alphabet which are represented using the symbols: ’ and c.

Beginning with the easy ones, there is the letter that is symbolized as: th, which sounds like the ‘th’ in the word ‘three’. The other letter is: dh, which sounds like the ‘th’ in the word ‘there’. As for the more difficult ones, they are as follows: Gh or gh, the nearest sound for this is that of the French ‘r’. H{ or h} The sound of this letter resembles the sound of ‘strong, breathy’ H.

The sound for h} is generated from the proximity of the throat that the normal h is, but from an area slightly further up the throat, with more tension in the local throat muscle, with the back end of the tongue closing in against the roof of the throat immediately before the uvula. Kh or kh The sound for this is perhaps somewhere between of that of ‘h’ and ‘k’, as far as the location of mouth where it is generated is concerned.

It is generated at the back of the mouth, by pressing the back end of the tongue against the soft palate whilst forcing the air through in the outward direction, causing the uvula to vibrate.