Thursday, July 30, 2009

How to Read & Write Arabic 19: GHayn

The last post in the, 'How to Read and Write Arabic' series looked at the lettter Ayn, a letter which has no equivalent sound in English. This posting we'll move onto it's sister letter, GHayn, a letter which is very similar in looks to Ayn, you just need to add a dot on top.


Writing GHayn
Because GHayn is a connector you'll know there will be four different forms of the letter (inital, medial, final and independent) all of which are shown below. The pencil lines with numbers indicate the order in which you should write the letter, whilst the pink highlights indicate previous letters (on the right hand side) and the letters which follow GHayn (on the left hand side):


independent


initial


medial


final



Making the Sound of GHayn
Even though GHayn does have an equivalent letter in English, it isn't that difficult to say and is definately easier than AYN to get right.  Just gargle for a minute or so with water, making note of the muscles you use and the sound you make. That in reality is what's needed when you pronounce GHayn.

And it's easy to remember: G for gargle and G for GHayn.

However, as with all the other Arabic letters which have no equivalent sound in English, it's strongly suggested you have the sound you're making checked with a native Arabic speaker, if you possibly can.


Photos
This week I'm going to change the format slightly.

Because this series has been going for quite some time, I think most readers will know the difference between the initial, meidal and final forms, this week I'm going to just use headings and photographs, without highlighting the letters. I'm doing this to make the exercises slightly more difficult and it allows you read the entire word, rather than just one letter.

Unfortunately I've only managed to find initial and medial GHayns, try as I might there doesn't seem to be a final or an independent GHayn to be found!



Initial








Medial










Hide & Seek
Now see if you can find GHayn in the photos below:








Good luck with practicing, be sure to come back in two weeks for the next letter of the Arabic Alphabet, faa.



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice article. Thanks for writing!

Shirley Sunman said...

thank you for reading!

♥ Arab Mania ♥ said...

Nice post, very educative :)