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)
“Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, ‘A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take;”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“O that I were a mockery king of snow,
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke,
To melt myself away in water drops!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written her fair neck round about:
“Noli me tangere for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold though I seem tame.””
—Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503?–1542)