Shadda
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Shadda (Arabic شَدَّة šaddatun "[sign of] emphasis", also called by the verbal noun to the same root, Tashdid تشديد tašdīdun "emphasis"), is one of the diacritics (Harakat) used with the Arabic alphabet, marking a long consonant (geminate). It is thus functionally equivalent to writing a consonant twice in the orthographies of languages like Latin, Italian, Swedish and Ancient Greek, and thus it is rendered in Latin script in most schemes of Arabic transliteration, e.g. رُمَّان = rummān "pomegranate".
Consonant length in Arabic is contrastive: دَرَسَ darasa means "he studied" while دَرَّسَ darrasa means "he taught"; بَكَى صَبِيّ baka ṣabiyy means "a youth cried" while بَكَى الصَّبِيّ baka ṣṣabiyy means "the youth cried". A consonant may be long because of the form of the noun or verb, e.g. the causative form of the verb requires the 2nd consonant of the root to be long, as in darrasa above, or by assimilation of consonants, for example the l- of the Arabic definite article assimilates to all dental consonants, e.g. (a)ṣṣabiyy instead of (a)lṣabiyy, or through haplology, that is, the elision of two identical consonants, for example أَقَلّ ʾaqall "less, fewer" instead of أَقْلَل ʾaqlal, as compared to أَكْبَر ʾakbar "greater".
The syllable closing with the long consonant is made a long syllable. This affects both stress and prosody. Stress falls on the first long syllable from the end of the word, hence أَقَلّ ʾaqáll (or, with i`rab, ʾaqállu) as opposed to أَكْبَر ʾákbaru, مَحَبَّة maḥábba "love, agape" as opposed to مَعْرِفَة máʿrifa "[experiential] knowledge". In Arabic verse, when scanning the meter, the syllable closing with the long consonant is counted as long, just like any other syllable closing with a consonant or a syllable ending in a long vowel: أَلا تَمْدَحَنَّ ʾalā tamdaḥanna "Will you not indeed praise...?" is scanned as ʾa-lā tam-da-ḥan-na: short, long, long, short, long, short.
