The Epiphany of Taa Marbuta

So this post may not be interesting to everyone, but i really got excited about it today so I'm going to share. This is going to be an odd lesson of Arabic, nothing you'll really be able to use haha just kind of some fun information. It blew my mind in class today.

  Ok so here are some basics. The third letter in the Arabic alphabet is taa. It sounds similar to the english T except instead of the eee sound after the t its an aah sound. taaaa. It looks like this:

Kind of like a smiley face. You start from the right and do the big curve and then you go back and add the two dots.

There is another letter in Arabic that sometimes sounds like taa and sometimes sounds like Alif, the letter A, which sounds like aaahh. This letter is called taa marbuta. It lookes like this:

You start from the right again and cross to the left, then go under to the right, and back up to the left. At the end you add the two dots. This sign is often, but not always, used to determine femininity of a word or a name. 

Now until today, I just thought they were two separate letters, that just sounded the same sometimes. That was until my professor, Dr. A. Zakaryae, completely changed my world.

This is where it might get a little complicated for those of you who do not know Arabic, but just keep reading and I hope you'll understand at the end.  

All Arabic words are derived from a root word, which is usually made up of three letters, sometimes four but not often. For example the letters Kaa taa and Baa, put together make kataba which means to write. Make it maktba and you have library. Kitab is book and Mktab is office. All interrelated words that have the same root. 

The root for marbuta (aka taa marbuta) is rraa baa taa. It looks like this:

Rraa is the curved slash mark on the far right. The hash above it is a fatha and it symbolizes the short vowel ah. The curve with one dot underneath this baa and the last letter is taa which you saw above. 

Rabata in this form means to tie. Now lets see it in the word marbuta:

Mim or the mmm sound is the first letter on the right. The we have rraa and baa in the highlighted square because they are part of the root. After that we have wow which is the uuuu sound. Then Taa which makes a deeper sound, almost like the letter D in english and then the taa marbuta which represents the taa from the root letters. 

taa marbuta is the word that describes the symbol. Marbuta with the root to tie means tied up. So taa marbuta is literally a tied up taa. Which totally makes sense when you look at the symbols! The bottom curve of the taa gets twisted up and knotted at the top and thats why there are two ends that stick out. When its tied up it sounds like ahhh, but it some circumstances it gets untied and sounds like taa. This just completely made my day. I know that not everyone finds this fascinating, but I really enjoy it. You know in kindergarten when you have the videos of the alphabet and the letters walk around and act kind of like people? Like Miss A eats an apple and the letter A suddenly has a mouth and teeth and is eating an apple. Well I just picture taa walking around and tripping on a stone or something and getting all tied up and becoming taa marbuta.

P.S. When I opened the page, I had trouble loading the pictures. I don't know how to fix that, but if you just click the spot where the picture is, it will open up the picture in a new window and it will be bigger as well.