Sun and Moon Letters

Sun And Moon Letters

In Arabic and Maltese, the consonants are divided into two groups, called the sun letters or solar letters (Arabic: حروف شمسية‎ ḥurūf šhamsiyyah) and moon letters or lunar letters (حروف قمرية ḥurūf qamariyyah), based on whether or not they assimilate the letter lām (ﻝ l) of a preceding definite article al- (الـ). These names come from the fact that the word for "the sun", aš-šams, assimilates the lām, while the word for "the moon", al-qamar, does not.

Read more about Sun And Moon Letters:  Rule, Orthography, See Also

Famous quotes containing the words sun and, sun, moon and/or letters:

    “Sun and moon and day and night and man and beast
    each with a splendor
    which man in all his vileness cannot
    set aside; each with an excellence!”
    —Marianne Moore (1887–1972)

    “I tell you there isn’t a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it’s bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better ha’ been left to the men.”
    —George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)

    “I thought to hear him speak
    the girl might rise
    and make the garden silver,
    as the white moon breaks,
    “Nossis,” he cried, “a flame.””
    —Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)

    “How dare I read Washington’s campaigns, when I have not answered the letters of my own correspondents? Is not that a just objection to much of our reading? It is a pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze after our neighbours. It is peeping.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)