Articles

Gutterals

There are four Hebrew letters that are called the gutterals. ר sometimes behaves like a gutteral although strictly speaking it isn't counted as a gutteral.

The Definite Article: "The"

Hebrew

To take any word, say like, מֶלֶךְ (melekh, "king") and turn it into the definite form, "the king", we attach a prefix onto the beginning of the word. This differs from English where "the" is written as a separate word. The rule basically has two parts, with some exceptional cases recorded in .

1. Add the letter ה to beginning of the word, usually with a patach, הַ.
2. Add a doubling dagesh to what was originally the first letter of the word, unless that letter is a gutteral.

Hence, for מֶלֶךְ, melekh, we derive the word הַמֶּלֶךְ, hammelekh.

If the word originally began with a begadkefat letter then the dagash will now be both hardening and doubling.

Arabic

Definite articles are simpler in Arabic. The definite article is written using the prefix ٱل. Formal texts such as the Qur'an include the small letter ص written over the alif, known as Hamza Wasl (not to be confused with the regular hamza, Hamza Qatʻ). If the previous word ends in a vowel then the alif is not pronounced. The first letter of the original word is doubled if it's a sun letter, which is indicated using a shaddah. The lam becomes silent also in this case. Otherwise, when the lam is pronounced then it has a sukoon. Some authors transcribe the definite article into English as al- regardless of whether the the alif or the lam would be pronounced in Arabic speech. The rule when the letter is a sun letter is called Lam Shamsiyah (lam of the sun), and when it's a moon letter it's called Lam Qamariyah. The Lamb Shamsiyah gets eaten! (I.e. skipped over, unpronounced)

There are 14 sun letters and 14 moon letters. Now, you're probably thinking, "My goodness! This rule sounded simple until you told me I had to memorize a list of 14 letters according to whether they're arbitrarily associated with the sun or not!" Fortunately, there's a trick tajweed (Qur'an recitation) textbooks won't tell you. The sun letters are pronounced with the tongue positioned near the front of the mouth and the moon letters are pronounced from either the back of the mouth or else they're not pronounced using the tongue at all, something that only applies to b, f, m and w, which are pronounced using one or both lips. If a letter is pronounced further back in the mouth than sh then it's a moon letter. The j sound (ج) is an anomaly. It's a moon letter even though it's pronounced from the part of the mouth assigned to the sun letters. J has two places of articulation because it's an affricate consonant. It's both alveolar and palato-alveolar, although conventionally affricate consonants are assigned a column in the phoneme table according to their second component. The fact that the second component of ج is pronounced from exactly the same place as ش (sh) and not further back than sh gives a little credence to the theory that ج was once pronounced like a g, like it's Hebrew counterpart גּ (as is still the case in some Egyptian, Sudanese and Yemenite Arabic dialects), which would place it in the voiced light velar stop position.

The second trick, if you're reciting the Qur'an, is to check if the ل has a sukoon written above it. If if has a sukoon then pronounce the lam, and if it doesn't then don't pronounce it.

References

1. Various authors. (2007). ה־. [online] Wiktionary. Wikimedia Foundation. [Accessed 22 Apr. 2018].