Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]

Apparently I’ve somehow picked up on how to read the phrase “alhamdulillah” in Arabic despite never studying the language. Neat!

I basically recognize “Allah” ﷲ based on the shape of the whole word rather than the individual letters, and I learned to read that word through exposure. In the phrase الْحَمْدُ لِلّٰهِ alhamdulillah I see there’s no alif at the start of Allah, though.

I think I learned to read ال al- just through repeat exposure since al- is literally the most common prefix in Arabic — it’s even at the start of Allah! — but I also know the letters alif and lam on their own because ا alif is memorable to me as the “simplest letter for the simplest sound”, and ل lam is memorable to me because it looks like (and literally is, in a sense) a backwards L.

After recognizing “al-??? lillah” I was already figuring from context that the text probably said “alhamdulillah”, but I still tried to confirm this by looking at the remaining letters:

• Medial ha ح‍ looked a lot like the initial kha خ‍ in the word khatam (as in خاتم النبيين khatam an-nabiyin, “Seal of the Prophets”), so I figured that the two letters ha/kha had to be variants of each other with similar h-like sounds. Previously, I’d known the letter ha really just from its isolated/final forms ح, just from going down an Arabizi rabbit hole once: ح ha is often written as 7 in Arabizi due to the similarity of the numeral 7 to the isolated shape of the letter ha.
• Medial meem ﻤ looked a lot like the final form of the related Hebrew letter mem ם, which also, very coincidentally, looks like the Korean letter ㅁ mieum, which was derived from the shape of the mouth to represent the fact that you say M with your lips. The origin of the Korean letter is completely unrelated to the Arabic and Hebrew letters but still makes them more memorable to me.
• Dal د is not a letter I had any real chance of recognizing. It’s related to its Hebrew, Latin, Greek and Cyrillic equivalents but is not particularly similar to any of them. But if I got to the point where I could tell that the text said “al-ham?? lillah” then there was really zero chance the unrecognizable last letter could be anything other than dal.

Learning new writing systems is really fun because you get to return to the joy of first learning to read your native language as a little kid. I wonder if I’ll manage to learn the entire Arabic script through passive exposure!