Having a mortal aversion to the details of Arabic prosody I have persuaded my friend Dr. Steingass, to undertake in the following pages the subject as far as concerns the poetry of The Nights. He has been kind enough to collaborate with me from the beginning, and to his minute lexicographical knowledge I am deeply indebted for discovering not a few blemishes which would have been “nuts to the critic.” The learned Arabist’s notes will be highly interesting to students: mine (§ V.) are intended to give a superficial and popular idea of the Arab’s verse-mechanism.
“The principle of Arabic Prosody” (called ’Arúz, pattern standard, or ’Ilm al-’Arúz, science of the ’Arúz), in so far resembles that of classical poetry, as it chiefly rests on metrical weight, not on accent, or in other words a verse is measured by short and long quantities, while the accent only regulates its rhythm. In Greek and Latin, however, the quantity of the syllables depends on their vowels, which may be either naturally short or long, or become long by position, i.e. if followed by two or more consonants. We all remember from our school-days what a fine string of rules had to be committed to and kept in memory, before we were able to scan a Latin or Greek verse, without breaking its neck by tripping over false quantities. In Arabic, on the other hand, the answer to the question, what is metrically long or short, is exceedingly simple, and flows with stringent cogency from the nature of the Arabic Alphabet. This, strictly speaking, knows only consonants (Harf, pl. Hurúf). The vowels which are required, in order to articulate the consonants, were at first not represented in writing at all. They had to be supplied by the reader, and are not improperly called “motions” (Harakát), because they move or lead on as it were, one letter to another. They are three in number, a (Fathah), i (Kasrah), u (Zammah), originally sounded as the corresponding English vowels in bat, bit and butt respectively, but in certain cases modifying their pronunciation under the influence of a neighbouring consonant. When the necessity made itself felt to represent them in writing, especially for the sake of fixing the correct reading of the Koran, they were rendered by additional signs, placed above or beneath the consonant, after which they are pronounced, in a similar way as it is done in some systems of English shorthand. A consonant followed by a short vowel is called a “moved letter” (Muharrakah); a consonant without such vowel is called “resting” or “quiescent” (Sákinah), and can stand only at the end of a syllable or word.
And now we are able to formulate the one simple rule, which determines the prosodical quantity in Arabic: any moved letter, as ta, li, mu, is counted short; any moved letter followed by a quiescent one, as taf, lun, mus, i.e. any closed syllable beginning and terminating with a consonant and having a short vowel between, forms a long quantity. This is certainly a relief in comparison with the numerous rules of classical Prosody, proved by not a few exceptions, which for instance in Dr. Smith’s elementary Latin Grammar fill eight closely printed pages.
Before I proceed to show how from the prosodical unities, the moved and the quiescent letter, first the metrical elements, then the feet and lastly the metres are built up, it will be necessary to obviate a few misunderstandings, to which our mode of transliterating Arabic into the Roman character might give rise.
The line:
“Love in my heart they lit and went their ways,” (vol. i. [232])
runs in Arabic:
“Akámú al-wajda fí kalbí wa sárú.” (Mac. Ed. i. 179).
Here, according to our ideas, the word akámú would begin with a short vowel a, and contain two long vowels á and ú; according to Arabic views neither is the case. The word begins with “Alif,” and its second syllable ká closes in Alif after Fathah (a), in the same way, as the third syllable mú closes in the letter Wáw (w) after Zammah (u).
The question, therefore, arises, what is “Alif.” It is the first of the twenty-eight Arabic letters, and has through the medium of the Greek Alpha nominally entered into our alphabet, where it now plays rather a misleading part. Curiously enough, however, Greek itself has preserved for us the key to the real nature of the letter. In Ἀλφα the initial a is preceded by the so-called spiritus lenis (᾿), a sign which must be placed in front or at the top of any vowel beginning a Greek word, and which represents that slight aspiration or soft breathing almost involuntarily uttered, when we try to pronounce a vowel by itself. We need not go far to find how deeply rooted this tendency is and to what exaggerations it will sometimes lead. Witness the gentleman, who after mentioning that he had been visiting his “favourite haunts” on the scenes of his early life, was sympathetically asked, how the dear old ladies were. This spiritus lenis is the silent h of the French “homme” and the English “honour,” corresponding exactly to the Arabic Hamzah, whose mere prop the Alif is, when it stands at the beginning of a word: a native Arabic Dictionary does not begin with Báb al-Alif (Gate or Chapter of the Alif), but with Báb al-Hamzah. What the Greeks call Alpha and have transmitted to us as a name for the vowel a, is in fact nothing else but the Arabic Hamzah-Alif (أ), moved by Fathah, i.e. bearing the sign َ for a at the top (أَ), just as it might have the sign Zammah (ُ) superscribed to express u (أُ), or the sign Kasrah (ِ) subjoined to represent i (إِ). In each case the Hamzah-Alif, although scarcely audible to our ear, is the real letter and might fitly be rendered in transliteration by the above-mentioned silent h, wherever we make an Arabic word begin with a vowel not preceded by any other sign. This latter restriction refers to the sign ’, which in Sir Richard Burton’s translation of The Nights, as frequently in books published in this country, is used to represent the Arabic letter ع in whose very name ’Ayn it occurs. The ’Ayn is “described as produced by a smart compression of the upper part of the windpipe and forcible emission of breath,” imparting a guttural tinge to a following or preceding vowel-sound; but it is by no means a mere guttural vowel, as Professor Palmer styles it. For Europeans, who do not belong to the Israelitic dispensation, as well as for Turks and Persians, its exact pronunciation is most difficult, if not impossible to acquire.