“The Arabic Alphabet” website (written by Michael Beard, illustrated by Houman Mortazavi) – http://alifbatourguide.com/
‘Ayn is for Arab – http://alifbatourguide.com/the-arabic-alphabet/ayn/
‘Ayn is for Arab – illustration by Houman Mortazavi
If we are predisposed to linguistic timidity this is the sound that scares us off. Strictly speaking it is simply the voiced equivalent of ح. But.
I had met Sayed a few months before, in Australia, where he’d tutored me in Arabic. Our lessons foundered on the gagging “ah” sound that has no equivalent in English – or in any other language. “You sound as if you’re choking on spaghetti,” Sayed would say, correcting me. “Just choke. Forget the spaghetti.” He usually gave up after fifteen minutes and tutored me in the wiles of Cairo instead. (Tony Horwitz, Baghdad Without a Map, 72-73)
Even a respected linguist makes it sound a little forbidding: ‘Ayn (that’s its name) is
…the voiced pharyngeal fricative, the most characteristic sound of Arabic . . . the throat muscles are highly constricted with the vocal cords vibrating to produce a sound close to a gag.” (W.M. Thackston (in Introduction to Koranic and Classical Arabic, xvi)
A manual teaching the Urdu script, by a linguist who has evidently read Thackston, says that in Urdu the letter is a simple glottal stop, but that in Arabic it was “a sound made when the throat muscles are highly constricted and the vocal cords vibrate . . .” and adds “similar to the sound made when retching” (Richard Delaney, Beginner’s Urdu Script, 89). William Jones, long ago, in his grammar of Persian (1771) describes the sound in Arabic as “harsh,” and adds, quoting the 17th-century scholar Franciscus Meninski, that it resembles vox vituli matrem vocantis, which I believe means “the sound of a calf calling for its mother.”
Jonathan Raban, in an account of his own study of Arabic, resists the ‘Ayn temptation. It’s still a difficult sound, but it’s not frightening. He even makes it sexy.
continued at: http://alifbatourguide.com/the-arabic-alphabet/ayn/
New essay: “Ẓâ is for Ẓarf” on “The Arabic Alphabet” website (by Michael Beard)
New Essay: “Ṭâ Is For Talisman” on The Arabic Alphabet website
Come From Away 
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