Some of them may easily be pronounced by the English reader...

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 dh = ظ h = ?

dh = ذ c = ع w = و r = ر gh = غ y = ي The Arabic vowel characters are Short a = ´ i = ِ u = ُ Long a = ا i = ي u = و This presentation is an effort to describe the sounds of these letters, and or explain how their sounds are generated, hoping that the reader may obtain some idea about those 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 dot below it or a line or diacritic above as shown in the table above. Furthermore there are a couple of letters in the Arabic alphabet which are indicated 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'.

dh, which sounds like the th in the word 'there'. As for the difficult ones, they are as follows: 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.

Example of the sound of kh found in English or that the English reader may be familiar with is Loch, the Scottish word for lake, where the ch in loch is pronounced as the designated kh in Arabic. S or s The sound of this letter resembles the sound of 'strong' S. It is generated by involving the main trunk of the tongue, by slightly curving the centre of the front half of the tongue in the downward direction.