Arabic alphabet
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The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing languages such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and others. Arabic is written from right to left, and is written in a cursive style of script. There are 28 basic letters in the Arabic alphabet. Just as different handwriting styles and typefaces exist in the Roman alphabet, there are Arabic scripts in a number of different Arabic calligraphy styles, including Naskh, Nastaʼlīq, Shahmukhi, Ruqʼah, Thuluth, Kufic, and Hejazi. After the Latin alphabet, the Arabic writing system is the second-most widely used alphabet around the world.[1] The alphabet was first used to write texts in Arabic — most importantly, the Qurʼan, the holy book of Islam. With the spread of Islam, it came to be used to write many other languages, even outside of the Semitic family to which Arabic belongs. Examples of non-Semitic languages written with the Arabic alphabet include Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Baloch, Malay, Balti, Brahui, Panjabi (in Pakistan), Kashmiri, Sindhi (in Pakistan), Uyghur (in China), Kazakh (in China), Kyrgyz (in China), Azerbaijani (in Iran) and Kurdish in Iraq and Iran. In order to accommodate the needs of these other languages, new letters and other symbols were added to the original alphabet. (See Arabic alphabets of other languages below.) StructureThe Arabic alphabet consists of 28 basic letters. Adaptations of Arabic script for other languages, such the Malay Arabic script, may have additional letters. There are no distinct upper and lower case letter forms. Both printed and written Arabic are cursive, with most of the letters directly connected to the letter that immediately follows. A few letters do not connect with the following letter, even in the middle of a word. Each individual letter can have up to four distinct forms, based on its position within in a word or group of letters. These forms are:
Some letters look almost the same in all four forms, while others show more variety. In addition, some letter combinations are written as ligatures (special shapes), including lam-ʼalif.[2] Many letters look similar but are distinguished with dots placed above or below their central part. These are regarded as an integral part of the letter, not as diacritics — the dots distinguish completely different letters (and sounds). For example, the Arabic letters transliterated as b and t have the same basic shape, but b has one dot below, ب, and t has two dots above, ت. The Arabic alphabet is an "impure" abjad—long vowels are written, but short ones are not—so the reader must be familiarized with the language in order to restore the missing vowels. However, in editions of the Qurʼan or in didactic works vocalization marks are used, including a sign for vowel omission called the sukūn and one for consonant gemination called šadda. Sorting
There are two collating orders for the Arabic alphabet. The original abjadī order (أبجدي) derives from the order of the Phoenician alphabet, and is therefore similar to the order of other Phoenician-derived alphabets, such as the Latin alphabet. In the hejāʼī order (هجائي), similarly-shaped letters are grouped together (see the next section). The latter is used wherever lists of names and words need to be sorted, as in phonebooks, classroom lists, and dictionaries. However, when letters are used for numbering, the abjadī order is exclusively used. The special abjadī order (in two slightly different variants) was devised by matching an Arabic letter of the fully consonant-dotted 28-letter Arabic alphabet to each of the 22 letters of the Aramaic alphabet (in their old Phoenician alphabetic order, also used by the Hebrew alphabet) — and adding the six remaining Arabic letters at the end. The most common sequence is (from left to right):
This is commonly vocalized as follows:
Another vocalization is:
Another abjadī sequence, mainly confined to the Maghreb, is:
which can be vocalized as:
Despite no longer being used as the standard order of the alphabet, the abjadī order is still used in things such as lists and outlines where a ordinal system of designating points of information or questions other than numbers is required. In other words, whereas a list in English might call its first point A its next point B, its next point C, then D, then E and so on down to Z, even today a list in Arabic would typically call its first point أ, then ب, then ج, د, ﻫ and so on down to ﻍ, rather than أ, ب, ت, ث, ج, and so on down to ي, as the modern order might suggest. The order is, also, still used in Modern Arabic mathematical notation when allocating variable names. For example, when the letters أ (ʼalif) and ب (bāʼ) have already been used for variable names, conventionally, the next letter to be used would be ج (ǧim). Major software packages, like word processors, lack the capability of sorting or generating numbered lists according to this order. Letters and letter variants The following table provides all of the Unicode characters for Arabic, and none of the supplementary letters used for other languages. The transliteration given is the widespread DIN 31635 standard, with some common alternatives. See the article Romanization of Arabic for details and various other transliteration schemes. Regarding pronunciation, the phonetic values given are those of the standard pronunciation of literary Arabic, the Dachsprache which is taught in universities. Actual pronunciation between the varieties of Arabic may vary widely. For more details concerning the pronunciation of Arabic, consult the article Arabic phonology. Primary lettersThe Arabic script is cursive, and all primary letters have conditional forms for their glyphs, depending on whether they are at the beginning, middle or end of a word, so they may exhibit four distinct forms (initial, medial, final or isolated). However, six letters have only isolated or final form, and so force the following letter (if any) to take an initial or isolated form, as if there were a word break. For compatibility with previous standards, Unicode can encode all these forms separately; however, these forms can be inferred from their joining context, using the same encoding. The table below shows this common encoding, in addition to the compatibility encodings for their normally contextual forms (Arabic texts should be encoded today using only the common encoding, but the rendering must then infer the joining types to determine the correct glyph forms, with or without ligation). There are 29 primary letters. The names of the Arabic letters can be thought of as abstractions of an older version where they were meaningful words in the Proto-Semitic language.
Modified lettersThe following are not individual letters, but rather different contextual variants of some of the Arabic letters.
The broken alif (ʼalif maqṣūra), commonly encoded as Unicode 0x0649 (ى) in Arabic, is sometimes replaced in Persian or Urdu, with Unicode 0x06CC (ی), called "Persian yeh", in accordance with its pronunciation in those languages. The glyphs are identical in isolated and final form (ﻯ ﻰ), but not in initial and medial position, where the Persian yeh gains two dots below (ﻳ ﻴ). The ʼalif maqṣūra has neither an initial nor a medial form. Although this is the common situation, the problem is not so simple, and no solution has been met yet as of September, 2007.[3] LigaturesThe only compulsory ligature is lām + ʼalif. All other ligatures (yāʼ + mīm, etc.) are optional.
Unicode has a special glyph for the ligature allāh (“God”). U+FDF2 ARABIC LIGATURE ALLAH ISOLATED FORM:
The latter is a work-around for the shortcomings of most text processors, which are incapable of displaying the correct vowel marks for the word Allāh, because it should compose a small ʼalif sign above a gemination šadda sign. Compare the display of the composed equivalents below (the exact outcome will depend on your browser and font configuration):
Writing vowelsShort vowelsShort vowels are generally not written in Arabic, except in sacred texts (such as the Qurʼan, where they must be written) and sometimes in teaching material. These are known as vocalized texts. Short vowels are occasionally marked where the word would otherwise be ambiguous and could not be resolved simply from context, or simply wherever they are aesthetically pleasing. Short vowels may be written with diacritics placed above or below the consonant that precedes them in the syllable. All Arabic vowels, long and short, follow a consonant; contrary to appearances, there is a consonant at the start of a name like Ali — in Arabic ʻAliyy — or of a word like ʼalif.
Long vowelsA long a following a consonant other than a hamza is written with a short a sign on the consonant plus an ʼalif after it; long i is written as a sign for short i plus a yāʼ; and long u as a sign for short u plus a wāw. Briefly, aā = ā, iy = ī and uw = ū. Long a following a hamza may be represented by an ʼalif madda or by a free hamza followed by an ʼalif. In the table below, vowels will be placed above or below a dotted circle replacing a primary consonant letter or a šadda sign. For clarity in the table below, the primary letter on the left used to mark these long vowels are shown only in their isolated form. Please note that most consonants do connect to the left with ʼalif, wāw and yāʼ written then with their medial or final form. Additionally, the letter yāʼ in the last row may connect to the letter on its left, and then will use a medial or initial form. Use the table of primary letters to look at their actual glyph and joining types.
In unvocalized text (one in which the short vowels are not marked), the long vowels are represented by the consonant in question: ʼalif, ʼalif maqṣūra (or yeh), wāw, or yāʼ. Long vowels written in the middle of a word of unvocalised text are treated like consonants with a sukūn (see below) in a text that has full diacritics. Here also, the table shows long vowel letters only in isolated form for clarity.
DiphthongsThe diphthongs [ai] and [au] are represented in vocalised text as follows:
Sukūn and alif aboveAn Arabic syllable can be open (ending with a vowel) or closed (ending with a consonant).
When the syllable is closed, we can indicate that the consonant that closes it does not carry a vowel by marking it with a diacritic called sukūn ( ْ ) to remove any ambiguity, especially when the text is not vocalized. A normal text is composed only of series of consonants; thus, the word qalb, "heart", is written qlb. The sukūn indicates where not to place a vowel: qlb could, in effect, be read qalab (meaning "he turned around"), but written with a sukūn over the l and the b (قلْبْ), it can only have the form qVlb. This is one step down from full vocalization, where the vowel a would also be indicated by a fatḥa: قَلْبْ. The Qur’an is traditionally written in full vocalization. Outside of the Qur’an, putting a sukūn above a yāʼ — which represents [i:] —, or above a wāw — which stands for [u:] — is extremely rare, to the point that yāʼ with sukūn will be unambiguously read as the diphthong [ai], and wāw with sukūn will be read [au]. For example, the letters m-w-s-y-q-ā (موسيقى with an ʼalif maqṣūra at the end of the word) will be read most naturally as the word mūsīqā (“music”). If one were to write a sukūn above the wāw, the yāʼ and the ʼalif, one would get موْسيْقىْ, which would be read as *mawsaykāy (note however that the final ʼalif maqṣūra, because it is is an ʼalif, never takes a sukūn). The word, entirely vocalized, would be written مُوْسِيْقَى in the Qur’an, or مُوسِيقَى elsewhere. (The Quranic spelling would have no sukūn sign above the final ʼalif maqṣūra, but instead a miniature ʼalif above the preceding qaf consonant, which is a valid U | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
