Ḏāl
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This article does not cite any references or sources. (December 2009) |
| Semitic alphabets |
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| Phoenician (c.1050 – 200 BCE) |
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| Hebrew (400 BCE – present) |
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History · Transliteration |
| Syriac (200 BCE – present) |
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| Arabic (400 CE – present) |
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History · Transliteration |
Ḏāl (ذ, can also be transcribed as dhāl), It is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being ṯāʾ, ḫāʾ, ḍād, ẓāʾ, ġayn). In Modern Standard Arabic it represents /ð/. In name and shape, it is a variant of dāl (د). Its numerical value is 700 (see abjad numerals).
Ḏāl is written is several ways depending on its position in the word:
| Position in word: | Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Glyph form: | ذ | ـذ | ـذ | ذ |
The South Arabian alphabet retained a symbol for ḏ, 
.
When representing this sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as ד׳.
This sound is found in English, as in the words "those" or "then". In English the sound is normally rendered "dh" when transliterated from foreign languages, but when it occurs in English words it is one of the pronunciations occurring for the letters "th".
In contemporary spoken Arabic, pronunciation of ḏāl as [ð] is found in the Gulf, Iraqi, Tunisian dailects and in highly-educated pronunciations of Modern Standard and Classical Arabic. Pronunciation of the letter varies between and within the various varieties of Arabic: while in Maghrebi Arabic, it is consistently pronounced as the voiced dental plosive [d̪], in the Arabic varieties of the Mashriq (in the broad sense, including Egyptian, Sudanese and Levantine dialects), it can be approximated to a sibilant voiced alveolar fricative [z], while words which have entered the local dialects have merged with /d/ and if written in Arabic script, it would be with dāl د. Regardless of these regional differences, the pattern of the speaker's variety of Arabic frequently intrudes into otherwise Modern Standard speech; this is widely accepted, and is the norm when speaking the mesolect known alternately as lugha wusṭā ("middling/compromise language") or ʿAmmiyyat/Dārijat al-Muṯaqqafīn ("Educated/Cultured Colloquial") used in the informal speech of educated Arabs of different countries.
See also [edit]
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