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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 January 2000 Issue No. 464 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 January 2000 Issue No. 464
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Special Books Profile Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Yaa is not Zed
The final instalment of a series of meditations on the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet, as inspired by Ibn Manzour's Lisan Al-ArabKaaf is the qaaf's double, and a closer blood-relation of the Latin q and k. The combination of a kaaf with an alif separated by a long vowel -- of which the name of the present letter is a clear instance -- provides a magic formula for series upon series of regenerative loci of meaning. The word kayf, to cite but one example, is equivalent to the English "how"; yet it also signifies quality, as opposed to quantity (whose counterpart is the similarly magic word, kamm); with the aid of a shadda (a grammatical element that turns kayf into kayyaf), it indicates the act of conditioning/modifying or the quality of having been conditioned/modified.
Laam, being the initial letter of most Arabic negatives (laa; lam; lan; layssa etc.), is the letter of negation; paradoxically, as a prefix, it is an astonishingly positive letter, performing a whole range of functions and brimming over with vitality. In fact, the laam's most laudable virtue is its versatility in this respect. Prefixed to nouns, it indicates that the subject or person that follows it is in possession of the object or quality that precedes it, e.g. al-maal l-Yazid means, "The money is Yazid's". Prefixed to verbs, it replaces the English "in order to" or "so as to", pointing out that the action described by the second verb in the sentence is a consequence of, or a reason for, the action described by the first; it is also a special form of the imperative tense. Prefixed to both nouns and verbs, the laam adds emphasis.
Followed by an alif, Meem is the most primal of expressions: the maa of something is its essence or being, hence madhaa (what) and limadhaa (why); besides the fact that it can also mean "that" or "which", maa is an expression of wonder and an especially poetic form of past-tense negation. Meem means nothing as a separate word, but its stolid, reptilian presence is unmistakable in Arabic.
Isn't it interesting that the sequence l-m-n occurs, in the exact same order, in both the Latin and Arabic alphabet? Noon quietly concludes that sequence, operating alternatively as an ancient synonym for "whale". Followed by the words al-qalam (the pen) and maa yastoroun (what they transcribe), noon occurs as a lone letter at the beginning of a frequently quoted verse of the Holy Qur'an. It is usually interpreted so as to mean "the inkpot", but for the old scholar Ibn Abbas it gave rise, strangely, to the following fiction: "The first of God's creations was the pen, with which He wrote down all that will happen till the end of time. Then He created the Noon and spread the earth over it. Then the Noon faltered and the earth shook. So He created the mountains to balance and keep the earth in place..."
Haa is not the English h. It may well sound the same, but its stilted rapidity of tone and the elegant curves that characterise its appearance on the page make it a different creature altogether. Depending on the tone in which the alif is pronounced, haa can be either a simple reference to the letter, or an interjection prompting the listener or reader to pay attention to what is about to be said.
Waw, a single letter, is the Arabic equivalent of "and". Elsewhere it is a w, a long vowel of the o-u variety, one of the three letters/long vowels (alif, waw, yaa) that do not belong to one or another ha'iz (alphabetical field or domain) and instead stand alone among other letters, sharing an exclusive extra-h'az logic of their own, and permeating the rest of the alphabet like some relentless liquid.
Yaa is the letter with which the language terminates. The last of the three long vowels, it performs the function of such English letters as y, e and i. Its exact role in the language, though absolutely indispensable, remains nebulous: the most common form of the interjection preceding a name to indicate that the possessor of that name is being addressed or called; a suffix meaning "of"; with a noon, a suffix meaning "me"... these are only a few of yaa's numerous and unpredictable manifestations, which make any dealing with this letter an ultimately precarious and uncertain affair. The only thing that remains certain is that the yaa is not a z.
By Samir Sobhi
