The ‘/F family

(a) The members are: ‘and gh; and f and q. The third member is pronounced much as in English; but something needs to be said about the pronunciation of the other three, for they have few or no parallels in English. The first, ', represents a voiced form of ḥ (see para. 23(a)), a sort of throaty gulp. (A teacher or a nativespeaker is virtually indispensable to help with this sound.) The second, gh, is a sort of voiced form of kh (see again para. 23(a)), and it represents the Parisian throat-rolled “r”, also heard in certain forms of Scottish-English speech. Q is a “k” sound, well back in the throat, sharp and without scrape: by contrast with the “simple” k sound (to come in para. 33), it thickens the vowels most noticeably.

(b) It is difficult to speak of the essential shape of this family, but it might be described as a small, squashed or broken, circle above the line.

(c) The four positions modify the shape as follows:

(d) The letter ‘itself takes no dot, gh takes one dot above the shape; f takes one dot above, and q two dots above (though various North African-Moorish styles follow other schemes for these last two letters).

The K family

(a) The members are k and l, both pronounced somewhat as in English speech: the l must be clear and light, not tending towards w as in some less acceptable English speech forms, e.g. “buw” for “bull”.