Alphabet – Lesson 7

Tashdeed (or geminate) is a sign that goes above a consonant to show that that consonant has to be pronounced as if there were two of them. Listen to the examples:

You can think of a geminated consonant as a longer version of it. Geminates appear in many languages such as Italian, Japanese, and Arabic. However, English does not have geminates and some English speakers have a hard time hearing the difference between a regular consonant and a geminated one. To get a better sense of what gemination means, you might want to think about the difference between the pronunciations of "seem minor" and "see minor".

For historical reasons, there are Persian words in which the letter “و” preceding the letter “ا” and following the letter “خ” is silent.

Worse than that, there are also words in which the letter “و” is pronounced like “o” even though it is not the last letter of a word. This is in fact the norm in European loanwords. Thus, we have two problems. First, when we encounter new words, there is a new potential pronunciation for the letter “و”. Second, when we want to guess the spelling of a word featuring the sound “o”, a new possibility is that the letter “و” should be used instead of the short vowel sign which could be omitted.

There is no definitive solution, but a helpful clue is that when “و” is read as “o”, almost certainly, it is either preceded by “خ” (this has historical reasons again) or it is in a European loanword.

A third trouble with the letter “و” is that it is sometimes pronounced as “ow” (sounding like the “ow” in the English word “grow”).