Sun and Moon Letters in Arabic

hey guys this is a short video I wanted to make not necessarily about Linguistics as a whole but rather to teach a part of the Arabic language I sometimes see being over complicated so let's just get started in Arabic the definite article is L in some words L stays the same but in others the lamb or l sound changes what determines this is the consonant that a word starts with for example if you want to make the word Kamar meaning Moon definite you just add L to get alar the moon consonants where L stays the same are called Moon consonants which comes from the word however if you want to make the word shems meaning Sun definite for example the lamb is going to assimilate or become identical to the consonant that the word starts with so instead of saying Al you says consonants that trigger this assimilation are known as sound consonants which also comes from the Arabic word in this case shems most resources to learn Arabic I've consulted teach these consonants based on memorization so they give you a huge list of moon consonants and a huge list of sun consonants and you're expected to memorize them this can work but I realized something a while back that made understanding this concept so much easier here is your tongue Sun consonants with only one exception that we're going to talk about soon are those that are formed with the tip of your tongue and moon consonants are all the other ones so with your lips or somewhere in your throat notice how t s and th for example all involve the tip of your tongue while uses the back of the tongue uses your throat and and B uses your lips that's because the first ones are all Sun consonants with the tip of your tongue and the second set are all Moon consonants everything else now let's look at some examples say them out loud with me and pay attention to where your tongue is Sal Tipp of your tongue soam that's also where the greeting comes from that's why you don't say Salam you sayam again the tip of your tongue th a dar again da tip of your tongue da d da keep repeating it and keep paying attention to where the tip of your tongue is Dar so again the tip of your tongue so so again Sun consonants are those that involve the tip of your tongue while Moon consonants are everything else again with a small exception but we're going to look at that separately now let's look at some examples of moon consonants bait b b is with your lips not the tip of your tongue so you say alab is with the back of your tongue so you're going to say it's not with the tip of your tongue it's with the back the back so is with your throat not the tip of your tongue so you're going to say that little s sound is also with the back of your throat so you're going to say now here's the exception I mentioned earlier G is a little more complicated so let's look at it in general the rule I'm talking about can work pretty well for understanding gim since it can either be a sun or moon consonant depending on the Arabic variety you're speaking if you pronounce it like Z with the tip of the tongue like I do Z since I speak Moroccan dja it's going to assimilate so if I wanted to take the word J meaning camel and make it definite I say it's a sun consonant however in Egypt Jim is pronounced with the back of the tongue g g notice how the of your tongue is completely still as a result this makes it a moon consonant looking at the same word for Camel if you want to make the word gaml definite because you're not using the tip of your tongue when you pronounce g you're going to say the only exception is when Jim is pronounced J like in classical Arabic which is pronounced with the tip of the tongue but is considered a moon consonant so even though you say JL with the tip of your tongue J you're going to say this is the only exception as far as I know if you have any information about your dialect that might perhaps do some of these things differently please leave a comment down below and I'm going to add it to a pin comments for Learners to be able to look at now let's go through all of them together again repeat the sounds after me and pay attention to your tongue the shin Z notice how these are all with the tip of your tongue ra so those were the sun letters or like you say in Arabic now let's look at the Moon letters again your lips so not the tip of your tongue G this is the exception but you can always go back if you want to rewatch that part of the video all your throat faf me ha W ya here's the same thing but grouped by reason let's look at the ones with the lips you see how it's the lips not the tip of your tongue so they're going to be the moon consonants now the ones with the back of the tongue are ya notice how again they just don't use the very tip of the tongue that you use to pronounce stuff like tongue they use the back and your throw all your throat so you don't use the tip of your tongue so yeah that's all I have for you guys today super short video but it's something I really care about since I think it can be made so much more intuitive than memorizing a big list of seemingly random consonants again if you have any information about your dialect that might perhaps do some of these things differently please leave a comment down below and I'm going to add it to a pin comment that I'm going to make for Learners to be able to read have a great day bye-bye

Channel: Sundro

Views: 5,232

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Id: Z5kveTCcpsI

Length: 5min 56sec (356 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2024