Exploring The Relationship Between Arabic Lettersا Characteristics and Their Dissonance

Letter dissonance is an undesirable phenomenon that scratches the eloquence of spoken text. Knowing the reasons for letter dissonance may be useful to evaluate eloquence of a given text. It may also help speakers to avoid letter dissonance in their speeches. In this paper, the relationship between Arabic letter characteristics and adjacent letter dissonance is explored. The followed approach is based on classifying Arabic letters into separate categories. Each category contains letters with the same characteristics. Then, the adjacency frequencies of these categories were computed in a text that is known to have no letter dissonance. These frequency values helped in identifying categories that show dissonance and hence find letter characteristics that are associated with letter dissonance. Using a Boolean algebraic approach, the set of letter characteristics that cause dissonance is identified through simplification. One main result of this research is that letters with different characteristics show different dissonance behavior which supports the theory saying that letter dissonance is related to the characteristics of the adjacent letters. Another result is that not all letter characteristics cause dissonance. It was found that the main characteristic that is associated with dissonance is the upperness characteristic.