The Letter Aleph in the Arabic Alphabet

The Letter Aleph

·        The first letter of the Arabic alphabet is Aleph

·        Remember that all 29 letters in the alphabet are consonants
Well, this is not exactly true for Aleph
Aleph doesn’t have its own sound; it is used to stretch the short A vowel to form the long AA vowel

compare the A sound in Bath & Father

the first is a short A and second is a long AA

Listening & Pronouncing

·        Listen to the words below. Each recording has two words that sound very similar except that the first word has no Aleph and the second word has one Aleph. Repeat the words you hear.

·        Sometimes it’s hard to hear the Aleph when it’s at the end of a word

·        Exercise (easy): how many Alephs do you hear in the following?

·        Exercise (medium): how many Alephs do you hear in the following?
The pace of the reading is now faster

·        Exercise (hard): how many Alephs do you hear in the following?
The pace is faster and the Alephs aren’t exaggerated
This is how normal Arabic sounds

Recognizing in Text

·        Writing the Aleph is easy; it’s just a straight line

This is how the Aleph looks in the four cases

·        Notice that the Aleph cannot connect to the letter after it
There will be a small gap between the Aleph and the next letter

·        All the letters in a word must be closely connected
The only spaces between letters are the spaces between the last letter of one word and the first letter of the next word
So don’t confuse the small gap after the Aleph with a space between words

·        Aleph is one of 6 letters that cannot connect to the following letter
The other 5 will be discussed later

·        There are 4 other letters that include a straight line
Let’s look at these letters briefly so we don’t confuse them with Aleph

ط ظ ك ل

·        It’s easy to tell Aleph apart from the first 3 letters because they have very distinct shapes. The first two look like a golf club, and the third one has a special squiggle on top
The last one is more difficult, though. Let’s look at the 4 forms for the last one and compare with the Aleph

·        Look carefully. You can tell the difference between Aleph and this letter when it’s in the beginning or middle of a word because Aleph doesn’t connect with the following letter, but this one does
And you can tell the difference when it’s at the end because Aleph is just a straight line and this letter has a curve like the English letter J

·        Exercise: scan the following texts and identify all instances of Aleph

قالوا

ولو تقول

كيف كانت صلوة نبيك

فتبارك اسم ربك ذي الجلال والاكرام

·        Answers: [2, 0, 1, 7]

·        Notice that when Aleph comes after the letter ل, it looks like this: لا
The Aleph curves in to the left a little

Writing

·        When you write the Aleph and it doesn’t connect to the letter on the right, start from the top and draw a line downward

·        When you write the Aleph and it does connect to the letter on the right, come in from the right and draw a line upward

·        Exercise: practice writing Aleph by copying the table below several times

Proceed to lesson 3