The shoes of Ḥonayn.—This saying was explained at Assembly Ten.

The story.—For see Zamakhshari on Koran xii. 3, in Anthol. Gramm. Arabe, p. 124, Arab. Text.

The Tales of Pleasure after Pain.—This was a celebrated collection of anecdotes.

How various are thy wiles.—I have read , as correspond­ing more closely with the first ḳarîneh.

A spotted Address.—It has been mentioned that the letters of this composition are alternately pointed and unpointed. There are several peculiarities to be noticed. The teshdîd and the conjoined lam-elif are naturally made single letters. Naṣîf al Yazaji, in his epistle to De Sacy, falls into a mistake through an excess of critical acumen. De Sacy, in noticing the latter-named peculiarity, had said that Ḥarîri made “the word ” a single letter, on which Naṣîf observes that is not a word, but merely one of the letters of the alphabet, which is not because it has no meaning. But De Sacy is strictly accurate, since he means that not only is made one letter when it forms part of a word, as in , at the beginning of the composition, but that the word , not, is made a single letter, as in the fourth line of the second piece of verse. Naṣîf then goes on to say that is rightly called a single letter, because it is the soft elif, as in , a letter that cannot be uttered by itself, and requires to be joined to it in order to make it pronounceable. In this he refers to the opinion of some, that the soft or quiescent elif, which is merely a letter of prolongation, and to be distinguished from hamzeh, as I shall notice presently, is really named , and that this is the which is reckoned between and , the lam being prefixed to the elif, because the latter cannot begin a word, and therefore cannot begin its own name. If this be true, and if the early grammarians did thus place the three weak letters at the end of the alphabet together, while they kept hamzeh at the beginning, it must be acknowledged that the true meaning of this accurate and scientific distinction was eventually lost, and that lexicographers, as well as the vulgar, looked upon the lam as an essential part of the double letter, since, in indices of shawâhid, or the like, verses beginning, for instance, with , not, are to be found under this heading. They treated lam-elif as a single letter merely because it formed a single character in writing.

A more important peculiarity in this composition is that the author treats the letter which bears the sign of hamzeh, in such words as and , as a , and makes it a pointed letter. The true nature of this letter has been the subject of many discussions among the grammarians, which must have been well known to Ḥarîri, who has criticised with such minuteness the faults in orthography committed by his contemporaries. The existence of such a letter as hamzeh, or the Hebrew aleph, is due to the strong and energetic pronunciation of the Semitic nations. In Arabic it may be said that there is no letter precisely equiva­lent to the corresponding letter in the softly uttered speech of England or France. For instance , though formed by the same action of the mouth as our B, is uttered with a stronger compression and a more rapid separation of the lips, and so of all the other letters. For this reason the pronunciation of Arabic by Europeans, even when they have a fair notion of the language, is almost unintelligible to natives, since the former utter an incomplete sound, particularly at the ends of syllables. For instance, in pronouncing , without the tanwîn, they seem only half to sound the , and almost to drop the altogether; the true Arabic pronunciation might be represented by bbedelll. From this habit of forcible utterance it comes to pass that when a word begins with a sound correspond­ing to our vowels, the Arabs necessarily utter it with the pre­fixion of a slight guttural, or rather faucial, sound. We can understand this by uttering energetically, and, as it were, jerking from the mouth, some English word beginning with a vowel, as and, ill, out. The more energetically we do this the more we are conscious of the prefixion of a very decided faucial to the initial vowel. This faucial is the Arabic hamzeh. It has been stated by European scholars of the highest authority, to differ from whom seems like presumption, that the hamzeh corresponds to the spiritus lenis in Greek words, and may be represented by the H in such French words as habit, homme. But such a description is, I must think, far from accurate. The spiritus lenis I conceive to have been a purely negative sign, denoting only the absence of aspiration, and to say that the hamzeh may be represented by the H in habit and homme, gives the idea that it has no value at all, since l’ habit and l’ homme are pronounced precisely as if they were written l’ abit, l’ omme. If the spiritus lenis in <Greek> and <Greek> had been a definite letter, like hamzeh, it would never have allowed itself to be eliminated or destroyed, as in <Greek> and <Greek>. If it is to be illus­trated by analogies from European pronunciation it may best be compared with the slight faucial sound which is interposed between two words the first of which ends and the second begins with A, in order to avoid an inelega confusion of the two. Thus, in pronouncing mœnia alta, we must either make a pause after the first word, or prefix a slight faucial, which is hamzeh, to the second, in order that one may not run into the other. A Londoner of the lower class uses the letter R for this purpose, and, in pronouncing the name of Julia Adams, will say Juliar Adams, but the educated make use of a sound which is equi­valent to the Arabic hamzeh, or the Hebrew aleph. In fact hamzeh is not only a letter but a consonant, with a distinct and definite value, as is sufficiently proved by its pronunciation in words like and , where it certainly bears no resem­blance at all to the spiritus lenis or to a silent H. Hamzeh is, indeed, only a feebly uttered , and bears the same relation to which bears to .

From this prefixion of hamzeh to vowel sounds it came to pass that when the tanwîn was affixed to a word ending with elif lengthened, the hamzeh appeared in the tanwîn, thus . Similarly where, in the changes produced by declension, a syllable is deprived of its consonant and remains only a ḥarakeh or motion of the voice (as we should say a vowel), hamzeh prefixes itself to it. Thus in , where the second syllable is really consonantless through the euphonious dropping of the radical , and has become a mere kesr, the hamzeh steps in and consonants the syllable to make it pronounceable. Similarly, in the plural of , the augmentative being elided, its place is supplied by hamzeh. In , the plural of , the principle is slightly different. There the elif in the singular, which is augmentative, is the quiescent elif ( or ), which is a mere sound of prolongation after a fetḥah; and this is the letter which becomes hamzeh in the plural, since the elif which appears in the plural is the elif of the plural, as in . Hence, strictly speaking, in all these cases the syllable in question has for its consonant hamzeh; and the yâ, written properly without points, is equivalent to the sign of kesreh, and indicates only the motion or vowel of the hamzeh.

The distinct utterance of hamzeh in the middle of words was, however, not strictly observed. The lightening, , of a word by the conversion of hamzeh into elif, or waw, or yâ, according to the ḥarakeh which attached to it was not incon­sistent with pureness of speech. To observe the hamzeh care­fully was called or . The ordinary writing of the hamzeh in such words as those instanced above was in accordance with the principle of tekhfîf, as if hamzeh in these cases had something of the sound of yâ, as indeed becomes sensible when the word is quickly uttered. But the learned in penmanship wrote the yâ without points in order to show that the letter was not a real yâ; the common people only writing it with points. In one case the hamzeh became a real yâ through this tekhfîf; this was when it had fetḥah, while the letter before it had kesreh. Thus enmity, a band, where it will be perceived that in the pronunciation the hamzeh is almost necessarily overwhelmed by the sound of yâ, which is projected on to it from the kesr of the preceding syllable. We may now perceive why Ḥarîri in this composition took the liberty of treating as a pointed letter the yâ, over which the hamzeh is written. In using the word , which is more accurately , he avails himself of the rule above stated, that hamzeh with fetḥah after a letter with kesreh becomes pure yâ. In the other cases he permits himself a greater license; but it is justified by the written character used, and the modification in the nature of hamzeh which that character, in the opinion of some, represented. It will be observed that in he treats the radical hamzeh as if it were yâ.