The Arabic Alphabet: A Guided Tour – http://alifbatourguide.com/

by Michael Beard, illustrated by Houman Mortazavi

D͎âd is for Drubbing – http://alifbatourguide.com/the-arabic-alphabet/dad/

 excerpt:

If your informant is a speaker of Persian, Turkish or Urdu, and no doubt other languages about which I know even less, Ramadan will be pronounced Ramazan. This is because the D of Ramadan, in Arabic, represents a sound which exists hardly anywhere else, and (like ذ and ظ), it becomes just another way to say Z. Speakers of Arabic are aware they have a letter of their own: Arabic is called لغة الضاد lughat aḍ-Ḍâd, the language of Ḍâd. (For the record, an authoritative article in Wikipedia says that the sound of ض does occur in a few other languages, among them well-known languages like Dutch and Korean.)

As with Ṣâd, it may be useful to know that the tongue is pressed more tightly against the roof of the mouth than with the familiar D of Dâl. The vowel which follows ض sounds broader. The student who is not particularly fastidious about exact pronunciation does not need to know that D͎âd is a pharyngealized voiced alveolar lateral fricative. (Thank you, Wikipedia.) Steingass’s Persian dictionary makes the distinction clear from the Persian point of view, as clear as it needs to be: it is pronounced “in Persian very much like z, whilst in Arabic the pronunciation inclines toward d.”) To my ear, it is not unlike the D in the English word “duh.”

Official English transcription when it attempts to represent the Arabic pronunciation of ض probably deals with the dilemma as well as possible: a roman D with a dot underneath (Ḍ, like the Ṣ in Ṣâd). As for languages where ض is pronounced Z, you have a choice. You could just write Z, as it is pronounced, or, if you want to make it clear which written letter it is, you could write it as you transcribe it, not as you say it (Ḍ plus dot). The International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, in their official list of equivalents, gives you a widely used way to transcribe ض with languages other than Arabic, which is Ż. It has the advantage that the dot is over the letter (like the dot in ض), but there is also something awkward about it – perhaps because it looks a little like, خ which is flowing and elegant, but a deformed خ made angular and flat. You won’t see it here. I’m going with Ẓ. (Granted, two chapters further on there’s another letter you could render as Ẓ. I’ll take my chances. TBD.)

Arabic includes, altogether, four such emphatic letters, which official transcription into English handles by adding dots underneath: in the standard sequence they occur huddled in a row: Ṣâd, Ḍâd Ṭâ and Ẓâ’ (ص,ض ,ط and ظ), no doubt to show their phonological kinship. All four are variants of other Arabic sounds : Sin, Dâl, Ta and Za (س,د, ت and ز).

Arabic seems to have sounds which didn’t exist in the predecessor languages. (There is evidently no equivalent of ض in Aramaic or Phoenician). Thus the dots over ض and ظ , which seem to be playing the same role as the dots in academic English, to identify newcomers.

The dots which distinguish ص from ض, (or ط, from ظ ) must have some other function than the dots we use in English transcription, since all four are emphatic. Evidently Ḍâd was heard at one time as a variant of Ṣâd, with the dot to differentiate them. I don’t hear the resemblance, but I assume the dots don’t lie.