If the conjunctive Hamzah is preceded by a quiescent letter, this takes generally Kasrah:  “Talat al-Laylah,” the night was longsome, would become Talati ’l-Laylah.  If, however, the quiescent letter is one of prolongation, it mostly drops out altogether, and the Harakah of the next preceding letter becomes {he connecting vowel between the two words, which in our parlance would mean that the end vowel of the first word is shortened before the elided initial of the second.  Thus “fi al-bayti,” in the house, which in Arabic is written f(i)y h(a)l-b(a)yt(i) and which we transliterate fi ’l-bayti, is in poetry read fil-bayti, where we must remember that the syllable fil, in spite of its short vowel, represents a long quantity, because it consists of a moved letter followed by a quiescent one.  Fil would be overlong and could, according to Arabic prosody, stand only in certain cases at the end of a verse, i.e. in pause, where a natural tendency prevails to prolong a sound.

The attentive reader will now be able to fix the prosodical value of the line quoted above with unerring security.  For metrical purposes it syllabifies into:  A-ka-mul-vaj-da fi kal-bi wa sa-ru, containing three short and eight long quantities.  The initial unaccented a is short, for the same reason why the syllables da and wa are so, that is, because it corresponds to an Arabic letter, the Hamzah or silent h, moved by Fathah.  The syllables ka, fi, bi, sa, ru are long for the same reason why the syllables mul, waj, kal are so, that is, because the accent in the transliteration corresponds to a quiescent Arabic letter, following a moved one.  The same simple criterion applies to the whole list, in which I give in alphabetical order the first lines and the metre of all the poetical pieces contained in the Mac. edition, and which will be found at the end of this volume. {This appendix is not included in the electronic text}

The prosodical unities, then, in Arabic are the moved and the quiescent letter, and we are now going to show how they combine into metrical elements, feet, and metres.

i.  The metrical elements (Usul) are: 

1.  The Sabab,[FN#450] which consists of two letters and is either khafif (light) or sakil (heavy).  A moved letter followed by a quiescent, i.e. a closed syllable, like the afore-mentioned taf, fun, mus, to which we may now add fa=fah, ’i=’iy, ’u=’uw, form a Sabab khafif, corresponding to the classical long quantity (-).  Two moved letters in succession, like mute, ’ala, constitute a Sabab sakil, for which the classical name would be Pyrrhic (U U).  As in Latin and Greek, they are equal in weight and can frequently interchange, that is to say, the Sabab khafif can be evolved into a sakil by moving its second Harf, or the latter contracted into the former, by making its second letter quiescent.