Jim: The Fifth Letter of the Arabic Script

Jim is the fifth letter of the modern Arabic order and the third of the older abjad order, in which it carries the numeral value three. It is written as a hooked upper stroke over a deep bowl that drops below the line, with a single dot placed inside the bowl. Ha and kha share that skeleton exactly and are distinguished from jim only by their pointing, so the three letters are the standard demonstration of how the Arabic script works. It joins on both sides, and in initial and medial position the descending bowl is lost and the letter reduces to a small triangular head sitting on the line with its dot beneath.

Jim is a moon letter, so the lam of the definite article is pronounced before it.

Its name descends from the Northwest Semitic gimel and it is the direct cognate of Hebrew gimel and Syriac gamal, whose sense was camel. As with the rest of the inherited names, the meaning did not survive the journey into Arabic. What did survive is the sound, and jim varies more widely across the Arabic speaking world than any other letter: it is a hard g in Cairo, a soft j across much of the Levant and the Gulf, and a sound close to the French j in parts of North Africa and the Sudan. Standard recitation of the Quran holds to one value, which is one of the reasons the recitation disciplines exist.