NOTES.  533

There  are  several  peculiarities  to  be  noticed.  The  teskdid  and
the  conjoined  lam-elif  are  naturally  made  single  letters,  Nasif
al  Tazaji,  in  his  epistle  to  De  Sacy,  falls  into  a  mistake  through
an  excess  of  critical  acumen.  De  Sacy,  in  noticing  the  latter-
named  peculiarity,  had  said  that  Hariri  made  "the  wordS"
a  single  letter,  on  which  Nastf  observes  that  1  is  not  a  word,  but
merely  one  of  the  letters  of  the  alphabet,  which  is  not  I4K
because  it  has  no  meaning.  But  De  Sacy  is  strictly  accurate,
since  he  means  that  not  only  is  )  made  one  letter  when  it  forms
part  of  a  word,  as  in  JL>A,  at  the  beginning  of  the  composition,
but  that  the  word  SI,  not,  is  made  a  single  letter,  as  in  the  fourth
line  of  the  second  piece  of  verse.  Nastf  then  goes  on  to  say  that
"i  is  rightly  called  a  single  letter,  because  it  is  the  soft  elif,  as  in
^h^9  a  letter  that  cannot  be  uttered  by  itself,  and  requires  J  to
be  joined  to  it  in  order  to  make  it  pronounceable.  In  this  he
refers  to  the  opinion  of  some,  that  the  soft  or  quiescent  elif,
which  is  merely  a  letter  of  prolongation,  and  to  be  distinguished
from  hamzeh,  as  I  shall  notice  presently,  is  really  named  D,  and
that  this  is  the  S  which  is  reckoned  between  j  and  «^,  the  lam
being  prefixed  to  the  elif,  because  the  latter  cannot  begin  a  word,
and  therefore  cannot  begin  its  own  name.  If  this  be  true,  and
if  the  early  grammarians  did  thus  place  the  three  weak  letters
at  the  end  of  the  alphabet  together,  while  they  kept  hamzeh  at
the  beginning,  it  must  be  acknowledged  that  the  true  meaning  of
this  accurate  and  scientific  distinction  was  eventually  lost,  and
that  lexicographers,  as  well  as  the  vulgar,  looked  upon  the  lam
as  an  essential  part  of  the  double  letter,  since,  in  indices  of
shawdhid,  or  the  like,  verses  beginning,  for  instance,  with  S,  not,
are  to  be  found  under  this  heading.  They  treated  lam-elif
as  a  single  letter  merely  because  it  formed  a  single  character  in
writing.
