There is one important remark more to be made with regard to the Hamzah:  at the beginning of a word it is either conjunctive, Hamzat al-Wasl, or disjunctive, Hamzat al-Kat’.  The difference is best illustrated by reference to the French so-called aspirated h, as compared with the above-mentioned silent h.  If the latter, as initial of a noun, is preceded by the article, the article loses its vowel, and, ignoring the silent h altogether, is read with the following noun almost as one word:  le homme becomes l’homme (pronounced lomme) as le ami becomes l’ami.  This resembles very closely the Arabic Hamzah Wasl.  If, on the other hand, a French word begins with an aspirated h, as for instance heros, the article does not drop its vowel before the noun, nor is the h sounded as in the English word “hero,” but the effect of the aspirate is simply to keep the two vowel sounds apart, so as to pronounce le eros with a slight hiatus between, and this is exactly what happens in the case of the Arabic Hamzah Kat’.

With regard to the Wasl, however, Arabic goes a step further than French.  In the French example, quoted above, we have seen it is the silent h and the preceding vowel which are eliminated; in Arabic both the Hamzah and its own Harakah, i.e. the short vowel following it, are supplanted by their antecedent.  Another example will make this clear.  The most common instance of the Hamzah Wasl is the article al (for h(a)l=the Hebrew hal), where it is moved by Fathah.  But it has this sound only at the beginning of a sentence or speech, as in “Al-Hamdu” at the head of the Fatihah, or in “Allahu” at the beginning of the third Surah.  If the two words stand in grammatical connection, as in the sentence “Praise be to God,” we cannot say “Al-Hamdu li-Allahi,” but the junction (Wasl) between the dative particle li and the noun which it governs must take place.  According to the French principle, this junction would be effected at the cost of the preceding element and li Allahi would become l’Allahi; in Arabic, on the contrary, the kasrated l of the particle takes the place of the following fathated Hamzah and we read li ’llahi instead.  Proceeding in the Fatihah we meet with the verse “Iyyaka na’budu wa iyyaka nasta’inu,” Thee do we worship and of Thee do we ask aid.  Here the Hamzah of iyyaka (properly hiyyaka with silent h) is disjunctive, and therefore its pronunciation remains the same at the beginning and in the middle of the sentence, or, to put it differently, instead of coalescing with the preceding wa into wa’yyaka, the two words are kept separate by the Hamzah, reading wa iyyaka, just as it was the case with the French Le heros.