Sun and Moon letters

As I continue through my journey, I find that I know a lot more than I originally thought. Don’t get me wrong, I still have a lot of learning to do get to where I would like to be but it’s nice to see things that I already know.

As I explained in a previous post, Darija is a language that is essentially Arabic with some French and Berber mixed into it. Having a strong Arabic background is not necessary but I do think it will help you learn Darija faster. I was fortunate enough to live in a Muslim household. What that meant for non arab Muslim children like myself was that I had to learn to read Arabic. We were not meant to understand what we were reading but it was only important that we could read. To this day I’m still confused why no one wanted to teach us the actual language. Because of this learning experience I had as a child I was also taught some basic grammar. As I am learning the Darija language I noticed one of those grammar rules from Arabic which was the Sun and Moon letters

To those of you who don’t know this rule, this is a rule that affects pronunciation with the definite article.

Definite article, what the heck is that?

To make it simple the definite article is just the “the”.  In Arabic, this is represented as ال (al). Well Arabic consists of 28 letters and 14 of them are classified as Sun letters and 14 of them are classified as Moon letters. For the moon letters, the sound doesn’t change so the book in Arabic is al kitab. The rule applies to the sun letters which is, if the word starts with a sun letter the l sound in al is dropped and assimilated with the word. For example if you wanted to say the man in Arabic it would be ar rajul and not al rajul. What are these Sun letters? I’ll list them below

• ت-t
  
• ث-th
  
• د-d
  
• ذ-dh
  
• ر-r
  
• ز-z
  
• س-s
  
• ش-sh
  
• ص-S
  
• ض-D
  
• ط-T
  
• ظ-Zh
  
• ل-l
  
• ن-n
  

Now some of these letters are not used in Darija but the rule still applies. One thing we should note is that the definite article in Darija drops the a in al and your left with l so in the book would be translated to l kitab.

• I thought you said in Arabic the l is dropped and the article is assimilated with the word?
• How can you do that if Darija only has the l to work with?

Well the way Darija gets around this is that they change the l to the appropriate sun letter. So to say the man you would say r rjl. How the heck do you pronounce that? Honestly I’m struggling with this myself but what I think your suppose to do is double the length of the sound of the sun letter.

I know that sun and moon letters may seem like a lot to grasp, I know because I felt the same way. But believe me, after practicing this for a while it will just sound wrong to pronounce a sun letter with an l sound. The rule will become automatic. If you still find this rule confusing send me an email or comment below and I’ll be happy to help further

Verb list