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:
“... the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The sun cares nothing for illumination.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Like the moon her kindness is.
If kindness I may call
What has no comprehension in’t,
But is the same for all
As though my sorrow were a scene
Upon a painted wall.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“If you are one of the hewers of wood and drawers of small weekly paychecks, your letters will have to contain some few items of news or they will be accounted dry stuff.... But if you happen to be of a literary turn of mind, or are, in any way, likely to become famous, you may settle down to an afternoon of letter-writing on nothing more sprightly in the way of news than the shifting of the wind from south to south-east.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)