Is there a word in English without a vowel? No. There cannot be a word without a vowel. Vowels help us divide words into syllables; besides, it is articulatorily difficult to move from one consonant to another. Therefore, vowels aid this movement. Reading the above three lines, you can see that each word has a vowel or vowels. In the previous lesson, you learn how letters are connected to form words. Where are the vowels in these words? Ostensibly, from the scripts of Modern Standard Arabic that you see in modern everyday print, there are no vowels. That is, all we see is consonants. Examining the last sentence in the table below, you can see only one long vowel, that is the
alif in the word
ما.
However, if you have looked at the scripts in the Book of Islam, the Holy Quran
القُرْآنُ الكَرِيْم, you will see the true written form of spoken Arabic, even everyday spoken Arabic. About eighty to ninety per cent of the diacritical marks that you see on the letters are in fact vowels. More precisely, they are the Arabic short vowels. In the example below, you can see the difference between Modern Standard Arabic written form and the accurate spoken transcription.
If we decompose the first sentence under Modern Standard Arabic Transcription in the table above into its constituent letters, it would look like this:
|
ر + ح + ي + م
|
غ + ف + و + ر
|
ا + ل + ل + ـه
|
إ + ن
|
The sentence is devoid of short vowels. However, if we transliterate it the way it is heard in everyday speech, it would look like this:
inna allaha Ghafuur raHiim
Looking the
transcribed sentence, the short vowels are clearly visible: two in the first word, three in the second, two in the third, and two in the last. Therefore, unlike the common belief that Arabic does not have vowels, it certainly does, and they are removed from the written form of Modern Standard Arabic for purely practical reasons (i.e. ease of writing and transcription). Arabs know how to pronounce words correctly without the diacritics being assigned given their intuition as native speakers. For a learner of Arabic as an additional language, it is essential that these diacritics be learned and assigned to words as often as possible until a considerable fluency is achieved in the language.
The
next lesson will provide more specific information about Arabic diacritics.
