Sun letters, moon letters

We recently finished learning all the letters of the Arabic alphabet and now are moving into other little details of the language. One of the benefits of learning a foreign language is the opportunity to look at your own language from a different perspective, which can help you to understand why your first language works the way it does. 

We've spent the past couple of days looking at the difference between sun letters and moon letters. A sun letter causes the "al-" prefix (meaning "the") to assimilate with itself. So, for example, in Arabic "sun" is شمس (shams) and "the sun" is الشمس (al-shams) but you actually pronounce it as ash-shams because "sh" causes the "l" to assimilate. In Arabic "moon" is قمر (qamar) and "the moon" is القمر (al-qamar) and in this case it really is pronounced al-qamar because the "q" doesn't cause the "l" to assimilate. 

When Andrew learned about these they felt somewhat arbitrary to him but slowly began to feel intuitive. 

When he initially taught them to me he spouted off this arbitrary list and I was like, "Yeah. No way am I ever going to remember that."

Like, I knew al-noor changed into an-noor and a few other things that could help me remember but mostly I was like, "There has to be a reason for this, a pattern of sorts." 

Of course, I never bothered to actually determine the pattern because, well, learning Arabic wasn't precisely top-priority in my life (I was busy surviving infants and toddlers). But, when I was teaching it to the kids the other day and I presented them the list of sun and moon letters, I said to myself, "Okay, let's figure out why! There has to be a reason..."

So, here's the list from Wikipedia:

Sun letters	ت	ث	د	ذ	ر	ز	س	ش	ص	ض	ط	ظ	ل	ن
	t	th	d	dh	r	z	s	sh	ṣ	ḍ	ṭ	ẓ	l	n
	/t/	/θ/	/d/	/ð/	/r/	/z/	/s/	/ʃ/	/sˤ/	/dˤ/	/tˤ/	/ðˤ/	/l/	/n/
Moon letters	ا	ب	ج	ح	خ	ع	غ	ف	ق	ك	م	ه	و	ي
	ʼ	b	j	ḥ	kh	ʻ	gh	f	q	k	m	h	w	y
	/ʔ/	/b/	/d͡ʒ/*	/ħ/	/x/	/ʕ/	/ɣ/	/f/	/q/	/k/	/m/	/h/	/w/	/j/

They explain this all in the article there, as well, but we didn't read that initially. We just read what was in the textbook, which didn't explain anything about why sun and moon letters exist, simply listing them out. And that's fine. 

We, however, looked at the list and said the sounds and quickly figured out that we were using the front of our tongue to make all the sun letters (these are known as coronal consonants). Since /l/ is also a coronal consonant, employing the front of the tongue to form the sound, it makes sense that it would be "swallowed up," so to speak, when pronounced with another coronal consonant. 

It's certainly possible to say al-shams, but when you're speaking quickly, ash-shams makes more sense. 

So, that's the rule: if you're using the front of your tongue to make the sound, the al- will assimilate with whatever sound you're making. 

Jiim is an interesting letter because it can act as a sun letter or moon letter depending on the dialect (and whether you pronounce it more like /j/ or more like/g/). 

Now that I know this, it makes perfect sense. But do we do the same think in English? 

Absolutely we do. 

Here are Benjamin and Alexander trying to figure out the in-/im- rule for English: 

Benjamin decided to make a little chart, sorting out which consonants took "im" and which took "in," and my little linguist heart gave a leap for joy. It took a bit, but the kids soon determined all on their own that any bilabial sound (m, p, b) would take "im" while other consonants would take "in." 

Once again because of assimilation. Of course, in this case our orthography reflects this change in pronunciation, but there other situations when it does not. 

Consider, for example, the word "something." 

Nearly everybody says, "sumpthing." 

But we don't write it with a /p/. 

Last thought: You can see Alexander has circled the second /m/ in immature. Off to the side he wrote "uneeded" because he felt that second /m/ was rather redundant. I thought it was cute that he wrote "unneeded" with only one /n/ (it would have been hypocritical for him to put a second /n/ in there, after all, given his logic...even though both those words require the doubling of that consonant).