Question
In
surah Al Kahf in ayah 77 it sounds like an extra sound is added between the
following words:
Is there an extra sound?
Answer
This
is a very important question, and may Allah reward you for asking it.
In
Arabic there is a rule forbidding the meeting of two saakin letters between
two words. If there is a sukoon on the last letter of a word, and the
first letter of the next following word has a sukoon, one of two things
happen:
- If
the last letter of the first word is a medd letter (alif, ya’ saakinah
preceded by a kasrah, or a wow saakinah preceded by a dhammah), the medd
letter is dropped in pronunciation.
- If
the last letter is not a medd letter, it acquires a vowel.
The vowel that is acquired is usually, but not always a kasrah.
The noon of the word
acquires
a fat-h when followed by a sukoon. The
meem of the plural pronoun
acquires a dhammah.
In
the example you asked about
, there is a tanween at the
end of the word
, and we know from the tidbit
lessons the tanween is a vowel plus a
saakinah;
thus this word ends with a sukoon. The
next word,
has
a
saakinah
as the first letter, since the hamzah wasl (
) is ignored when
continuing. When reading these two words together without stopping, we know
now that there are two saakin letters next to each other, the tanween of the
word
and
the
of
the word
.
The tanween then acquires a kasrah, to rid us of the problem of having
two saakin letters next to each other. This
is the extra sound you are hearing. Instead
of the
of
the tanween being saakinah, it now has a kasrah.
In pronunciation now, this word is pronounced (but not written) as:
, then the reader goes
directly to the
saakinah
of the word
.
Again, this is only when reading in continuum, which will be the usual
case with these two words. The
same holds for all word ending in a tanween and followed by a word that has a
sukoon as the first pronounced letter; in all cases the tanween will get a
kasrah to prevent the two saakin letters from meeting.
