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:
“A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“The mysteries remain,
I keep the same
cycle of seed-time
and of sun and rain;”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“The sun descending in the west,
The evening star does shine;
The birds are silent in their nest,
And I must seek for mine.”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“The moon is nothing
But a circumambulating aphrodisiac
Divinely subsidized to provoke the world
Into a rising birth-rate.”
—Christopher Fry (b. 1907)
“In one instance, we understood that a woman was the post- mistress, and they said that she made the best one on the road; but we suspected that the letters must be subjected to a very close scrutiny there.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)