Lesson 20: Consonant Hamze ء

Lesson 20: Consonant Hamze 

As you remember, we have six vowels in Persian, which enable us to pronounce the letters. And as you have probably noticed, I have already mentioned that we have six main sounds (vowels). Do you remember? I said that because in addition to these six vowels we have two more that can hardly be called vowels.

Let me explain it a bit more. How do you pronounce this English word ‘address’? I am sure all of you can pronounce it well. It is something like this /ædres/. Is it correct? Good! Now tell me how do you pronounce the letters ‘d’ and ‘s’ here? It’s quite clear. Your tongue simply stops or pauses on these letters without producing any extra sounds. It seems not so important in English. Nevertheless, in Persian we have a name for this. It is called pause or sokoon /soku:n/in Persian.

Click here to listen.

The representative of this pause is what you see on .