Silent starters and clean stops

Foundation — Noorani Qaida · a self-paced course lesson

Many words begin with alif carrying hamzat al-wasl (ٱ) — a "connector" hamza pronounced only when you START on the word. In the middle of flowing speech it disappears: bismi LLAHI, not bismi ʼallahi. The definite article al- is the most common case: you will read wa-l-hamdu, not wa al-hamdu. Once you hear this, connected reading suddenly sounds like the reciters you know — because this is what they are doing.

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