Hamza - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Not to be confused with the letter , which has a similar looking initial form.

Hamza is a letter in the Arabic alphabet

Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters. Because letters usually stand for consonants, it is classified as an abjad.-Consonants:The Arabic alphabet has...

, representing the glottal stop

Glottal stop

The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...

ʔ. Hamza is not one of the 28 "full" letters, and owes its existence to historical inconsistencies in the standard writing system

Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...

. In the Phoenician

Phoenician alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia...

and Aramaic

Aramaic alphabet

The Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet and became distinctive from it by the 8th century BC. The letters all represent consonants, some of which are matres lectionis, which also indicate long vowels....

alphabets, from which the Arabic alphabet is descended, the glottal stop was expressed by aleph
Aleph
* Aleph or Alef is the first letter of the Semitic abjads descended from Proto-Canaanite, Arabic alphabet, Phoenician alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet-People:*Aleph , an Italo disco artist and alias of Dave Rodgers...

(

), continued by alif ( ) in Arabic alphabet

Arabic alphabet

. However, alif was used to express both a glottal stop, and a long vowel /aː/. To indicate that a glottal stop, and not a mere vowel, was intended, hamza was added diacritic

Diacritic

A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...

ally to alif. In modern orthography, under certain circumstances, hamza may also appear on the line, as if it were a full letter, independent of an alif.

Hamzat waṣl

The hamza letter on its own always represents ; that is, a phonemic glottal stop. Compared to this, or is a non-phonemic glottal stop produced automatically at the beginning of an utterance. It is written as alif

Aleph

* Aleph or Alef is the first letter of the Semitic abjads descended from Proto-Canaanite, Arabic alphabet, Phoenician alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet-People:*Aleph , an Italo disco artist and alias of Dave Rodgers...

carrying a sign (only in Koranic texts) and normally indicated by a regular alif without a hamza. It occurs, for example, in the definite article , , imperative verbs and the perfective aspect of verb forms VII to X, but is not pronounced following a vowel in Modern Standard Arabic: (e.g. for written ). It occurs only in the beginning of words (can occur after prepositions and the definite article).

Orthography

The hamza can be written alone or with a carrier, in which case it becomes a diacritic

Diacritic

Alone: (always isolated)
Combined with a letter:
- and (above and under an ) (joined finally only )
- (above a ) (joined finally only )
- (above a dotless , also called ) (joined initially, medially and finally , though not initially in Literary Arabic, but other languages written in Arabic-based script may have it initially in words)

Hamza rules in Modern Standard Arabic:

Summary

Initial hamza is always perched over or under an alif. Otherwise, surrounding vowels determine the seat of the hamza – but, preceding long vowels or diphthongs are ignored (as are final short vowels).
over over if there are two conflicting vowels that “count”; on the line if there are none.
As a special case, and require hamza on the line, instead of over an alif as you would expect from rule #1. (See III.1b below.)
Two adjacent alifs are never allowed. If the rules call for this, replace the combination by a single alif-madda.

Detailed description

Logically, hamza is just like any other letter, but it may be written in different ways. It has no effect on the way other letters are written. In particular, surrounding long vowels are written just as they always are, regardless of the “seat” of the hamza – even if this results in the appearance of two consecutive waws or yaas.
Hamza can be written in four ways – on its own (“on the line”) or over an alif, waw, or yaa, called the “seat” of the hamza. When written over yaa, the dots that would normally be written underneath disappear.
When, according to the rules below, a hamza with an alif seat would occur before an alif which represents the vowel ā, instead a single alif is written with the madda symbol over it.
The rules for hamza depend on whether it occurs as the initial, middle, or final letter (not sound) in a word. (Thus, final short inflectional vowels do not count, but when –an is written as alif + nunation, it does count and the hamza is considered medial.)

I. If the hamza is initial:

If the following letter is a short vowel: (a) (as in ) or (u) (as in ), the hamza is written over a place-holding alif; (i) (as in ) the hamza is written under a place-holding alif. This is called "hamza on a wall".

If the letter following the hamza is an alif itself: (as in ) alif madda will occur.

II. If the hamza is final:

If a short vowel precedes: the hamza is written over the letter ( or ) corresponding to the short vowel.
Otherwise: the hamza is written on the line (as in "thing").

III. If the hamza is medial:

If a long vowel or diphthong precedes, the seat of the hamza is determined mostly by what follows:
If or follows, the hamza is written over or , accordingly.
Otherwise, the hamza wants to be written on the line. If a precedes, however, this would conflict with the stroke joining the to the following letter, so the hamza is written over . (as in )
Otherwise, both preceding and following vowels have an effect on the hamza.
If there is only one vowel (or two of the same kind), that vowel determines the seat ( or ).
If there are two conflicting vowels, takes precedence over , over , so "hundred" is written , with hamza over the .
Alif-madda will occur if appropriate.

Not surprisingly given the complexity of these rules, there is some disagreement.

Barron’s 201 Arabic Verbs follows these rules exactly (although the sequence does not occur; see below).
John Mace’s Teach Yourself Arabic Verbs and Essential Grammar presents alternative forms in almost all cases when hamza is followed by a long . The motivation appears to be to avoid two s in a row. Generally, the choice is between the form following the rules here, or an alternative form using hamza over yaa in all cases. Example forms are . Exceptions:
In the sequence , e.g. , the alternatives are hamza on the line, or hamza over , when the rules here would call for hamza over . Perhaps the resulting sequence of three waws would be especially repugnant?
In the sequence , the alternative form has hamza over alif, not .
The forms have no alternative form. (But note with the same sequence of vowels!)
Haywood and Nahmad’s A new Arabic grammar does not write the paradigms out in full but in general agrees with John Mace’s book, including the alternative forms – and sometimes lists a third alternative where the entire sequence is written as a single hamza over instead of as two letters.
"Al-Kitaab fii Ta:allum ..." presents paradigms with hamza written the same way throughout, regardless of what the rules above say. Thus with hamza only over alif, with hamza only over , with hamza only over alif although this is not allowed in any of the previous three books. (This appears to be an over-generalization on the part of the Al-Kitaab writers.)

Latin representations

There are different ways to represent hamza in Latin transliteration:

In the International Phonetic Alphabet
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...

(IPA), the sound of the glottal stop
Glottal stop
The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...

is represented by: ʔ
Glottal stop (letter)
The symbol ⟨⟩ is a letter of the Latin alphabet, used to represent a glottal stop in several phonetic transcription schemes, as well as in the alphabets of some languages...

.
There is a tradition of using ', the simple apostrophe, whereas a reversed one, or backquote, represents `ayn .
Some standard transliterations
Arabic transliteration
Different approaches and methods for the romanization of Arabic exist. They vary in the way that they address the inherent problems of rendering written and spoken Arabic in the Latin alphabet; they also use different symbols for Arabic phonemes that do not exist in English or other European...

such as DIN 31635
DIN 31635
DIN 31635 is a Deutsches Institut für Normung standard for the transliteration of the Arabic alphabet adopted in 1982. It is based on the rules of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft as modified by the International Orientalist Congress 1936 in Rome...

, transliterate it with a modifier letter right half ring and others such as ALA-LC with the modifier letter apostrophe
Modifier letter apostrophe
The modifier letter apostrophe is a glyph. It is used in the orthography of Tundra Nenets to denote a glottal stop. In IPA it is used to express ejective consonants. It is encoded at ....

.
Different unstandardized symbols, as 2 in Arabic chat alphabet
Arabic Chat Alphabet
The Arabic chat alphabet, Arabizi, Arabish or Araby, , is an alphabet used to communicate in the Arabic language over the Internet or for sending messages via cellular phones when the actual Arabic alphabet is unavailable for technical reasons...

.

Hamzat waṣl

Orthography

Summary

Detailed description

Latin representations

See also