SHORT VOWELS

Short Vowels in Arabic:

In Arabic short vowels are not a part of the Arabic alphabet, instead they are written as marks over or below the consonant and sometimes over or below a long vowel. To make it easy we will take an example in English:  the word Canada is written as CNDA but using Arabic Alphabet, the vowel A between C and N and between N and D are omitted, instead they’re replaced by small symbols, especially because they’re only short vowels, you see the little dashes on the top of C and on the top of N in the image below, they’re called FATHA in Arabic, meaning the short vowel “A” in English, so instead of writing a word full of vowels in Arabic, we only write the FATHA on the top of a consonant to indicate a short vowel “A”, and also we have symbols referring to short vowel “E” or “I” , and also a symbol for short vowel “O” , actually this is a good idea, because it’s saving space and also has an other advantage that we will see later. You may have noticed that the consonant D and the vowel A don’t have any symbols on the top of them in the image below, that’s because the “A” at the end is considered a long vowel in this word, so it’s the vowel of “D”, no need to add another vowel on the top of “D” since the long vowel “A” is already helping us pronounce the word the right way. Now you can look at the word Canada in Arabic; you will see that it has the exact symbols as the word CNDA.

The table below shows other types of symbols referring to Arabic short vowels. First we see Washington the way it’s written in English, and then we can see it using English Alphabet but Arabic symbols of short vowels. And finally you can

  see the word in Arabic with its full short vowels.

 “WA” as you noticed doesn’t need a symbol, because the “W” is followed by a long vowel “A”, “SH” is not followed by a vowel, which means that we need to add a short vowel referring to “i”, and indeed we added one already, it’s the tick below the “SH” which is called KASRAH, you can also see it marked as (#3). The “N” has a small circle on the top of it, that symbol is called SUKOUN (marked as # 4 in the table below) referring to a consonant without a vowel, So any time we have a consonant that doesn’t have a vowel, we just add that small circle on the top, note that the SUKOUN should always be placed on the top and never below a consonant. So we used the Sukoun in this word because we didn’t say NA NO NI but we just said N. Now let’s look at the T, it has a little symbol which looks like comma on the top of the letter, that symbol is called DAMMAH (# 2 in the table above) referring to a short vowel “O” , so when we add DAMMAH to the letter “T”, we will get “TO”, easy, isn’t it! And finally as we have seen before, the final N has another SUKOUN meaning that the N is without a Vowel, and should be pronounced N full stop.

Let’s review what we just went through.

1 = FATHA = Short Vowel “A”

2 = DAMMAH = Short Vowel “O” or “U”

3 = KASRAH = Short Vowel “I” or “E”

4 = SUKOUN = Used for consonants lacking a vowel after them.

5= FATHATAIN= double FATHA (FATHA on the top of another FATHA)= FATHA + N= the short vowel “A”+ N: Ghadan = غداً = Tomorrow

6= KASRATAIN= double KASRAH (KASRAH on the top of another KASRAH)= KASRAH+ N= the short vowel “i” or “e”+ N: Kuratin= كرةٍ =a ball

7= DAMMATAIN= double DAMMAH (DAMMAH next to another DAMMAH)= DAMMAH+ N= the short vowel “o” or “u”+ N: Kitabun=   كتابٌ= a book

Note that # 5, 6, 7 are not used as much as 1-4, also note that # 5, 6, 7 are only used at the end of a word