Before I proceed to show how from the prosodical unities, the moved and the quiescent letter, first the metrical elements, then the feet and lastly the metres are built up, it will be necessary to obviate a few misunderstandings, to which our mode of transliterating Arabic into the Roman character might give rise.

The line:: 

   “Love in my heart they lit and went their ways,” (vol. i. 232)

runs in Arabic: 

   “Akamu al-wajda fi kalbi wa saru” (Mac.  Ed. i. 179).

Here, according to our ideas, the word akamu would begin with a short vowel a, and contain two long vowels a and u; according to Arabic views neither is the case.  The word begins with “Alif,” and its second syllable ka closes in Alif after Fathah (a), in the same way, as the third syllable mu closes in the letter Waw (w) after Zammah (u).

The question, therefore, arises, what is “Alif.”  It is the first of the twenty-eight Arabic letters, and has through the medium of the Greek Alpha nominally entered into our alphabet, where it now plays rather a misleading part.  Curiously enough, however, Greek itself has preserved for us the key to the real nature of the letter.  In ’ the initial a is preceded by the so called spiritus lends (’), a sign which must be placed in front or at the top of any vowel beginning a Greek word, and which represents that slight aspiration or soft breathing almost involuntarily uttered, when we try to pronounce a vowel by itself.  We need not go far to find how deeply rooted this tendency is and to what exaggerations it will sometimes lead.  Witness the gentleman who, after mentioning that he had been visiting his “favourite haunts” on the scenes of his early life, was sympathetically asked, how the dear old ladies were.  This spiritus lends is the silent h of the French “homme” and the English “honour,” corresponding exactly to the Arabic Hamzah, whose mere prop the Alif is, when it stands at the beginning of a word:  a native Arabic Dictionary does not begin with Bab al-Alif (Gate or Chapter of the Alif), but with Bab al-Hamzah.  What the Greeks call Alpha and have transmitted to us as a name for the vowel a, is in fact nothing else but the Arabic Hamzah-Alif,(~)moved by Fathah, i.e. bearing the sign(~) for a at the top (~), just as it might have the sign Zammah (~) superscribed to express u (~), or the sign Kasrah (~) subjoined to represent i(~).  In each case the Hamzah-Alif, although scarcely audible to our ear, is the real letter and might fitly be rendered in transliteration by the above mentioned silent h, wherever we make an Arabic word begin with a vowel not preceded by any other sign.  This latter restriction refers to the sign ’, which in Sir Richard Burton’s translation of The Nights, as frequently in books published in this country, is used to represent the Arabic letter ~ in whose very name ’Ayn it occurs.  The ’Ayn is “described as produced by a smart compression of the upper part of the windpipe and forcible emission of breath,” imparting a guttural tinge to a following or preceding vowel-sound; but it is by no means a mere guttural vowel, as Professor Palmer styles it.  For Europeans, who do not belong to the Israelitic dispensation, as well as for Turks and Persians, its exact pronunciation is most difficult, if not impossible to acquire.