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 moon, sun and, sun, moon and/or letters:

    “That if a dancer stayed his hungry foot
    It seemed the sun and moon were in the fruit:”
    —William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

    “As the shade went up
    And the ambulance came crashing through the dust
    Of the new day, the moon and the sun and the stars,
    And the iceberg slowly sank
    In the volcano and the sea ran far away
    Yellow over the hot sand, green as the green trees.”
    —John Ashbery (b. 1927)

    “The sun is an example. What it seems
    It is and in such seeming all things are.”
    —Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    “The skreak and skritter of evening gone
    And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
    The sorrows of sun, too, gone . . . the moon and moon,
    The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
    In measureless measures, not a bird for me....”
    —Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    “It is hard to believe that England is so near as from your letters it appears; and that this identical piece of paper has lately come all the way from there hither, begrimed with the English dust which made you hesitate to use it; from England, which is only historical fairyland to me, to America, which I have put my spade into, and about which there is no doubt.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)