(Redirected from Arabic script)
The 'Arabic alphabet' is the
script used for writing languages such as
Arabic,
Persian,
Urdu, and others.
The alphabet was first used to write texts in Arabic -- most importantly, the
Qur'an, 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,
Malay,
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.)
Just as different
handwriting styles and
typefaces exist in the
Roman alphabet, the Arabic alphabet exists in different styles such as
Nasta'līq,
Thuluth,
Kufic and others (see
Arabic calligraphy). These styles can vary widely.
Structure of the Arabic alphabet
The Arabic alphabet, written from right to left, is composed of 28 basic letters. Adaptations of the script for other languages such as
Malay,
Persian and
Urdu have additional letters (see
Malay-Arabic script). There is no difference between
upper and lower case nor between written and printed letters. Most of the letters connect directly to the letter which immediately follows, which gives written text an overall cursive appearance. Each individual letter can have up to four distinct forms, based upon where the letter appears in a word:
★ Initial, or medial following a non-connecting letter
★ Medial following a connecting letter
★ Word-final, following a connecting letter
★ Isolated, or word-final following a non-connecting letter
In typographical fonts, some combinations of two or three letters are given special
ligatures.
The Arabic alphabet is an "impure"
abjad—
short vowels are not written, though long ones are—so the reader must know the language in order to restore the vowels. However, in editions of the Qur'an or in didactic works vocalization marks are used – including a sign for vowel omission ''(sukūn)'' and one for
gemination/doubling/lengthening of consonants ''(šadda)''.
The names of Arabic letters can be thought of as abstractions of an older version where the names of the letters signified meaningful words in the
Proto-Semitic language.
There are two orders for the Arabic alphabet. The original Abjadī order derives from the order of
Phoenician alphabet, and is therefore similar to the order of other Phoenician-derived alphabets, such as the
Latin alphabet. The standard order used today, and shown in the table, is the Hejā'ī order, where similarly-shaped letters are grouped together.
Abjadī order
The special Abjadī order (or two slightly variant orders) 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) — leaving six remaining Arabic letters at the end.
The most common Abjad sequence is (from left to right):
This is commonly vocalized as follows:
:
★ .
Another vocalization is:
:
★
Another Abjad 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 Abjadi 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 "", then "", then "", "", "" and so on down to "", rather than "", "", "", "", "", and so on down to "", as the modern order might suggest. The order is, also, still used in
Modern Arabic mathematical notation when allocating variable names. For example when a the letters أ (alif) ب (ba') have been already used for variable names, conventionally, the next letter to be used would be ج (ġim)
Presentation of the alphabet
Arabic Alphabet
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 the ''
fusha'' language as 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 letters
The 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).
General
Unicode | Contextual forms | Name | Translit. | Phonemic Value (IPA) |
|---|
| Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial |
|---|
0627
| FE8D
| FE8E
| — | | / | various, including |
0628
| FE8F
| FE90
| FE92
| FE91
| | | |
062A
| FE95
| FE96
| FE98
| FE97
| | | |
062B
| FE99
| FE9A
| FE9C
| FE9B
| | | |
062C
| FE9D
| FE9E
| FEA0
| FE9F
| | (also j, g) | / / |
062D
| FEA1
| FEA2
| FEA4
| FEA3
| | | |
062E
| FEA5
| FEA6
| FEA8
| FEA7
| | (also kh, x) | |
062F
| FEA9
| FEAA
| — | | | |
0630
| FEAB
| FEAC
| — | | (also dh, ð) | |
0631
| FEAD
| FEAE
| — | | | |
0632
| FEAF
| FEB0
| — | | | |
0633
| FEB1
| FEB2
| FEB4
| FEB3
| | | |
0634
| FEB5
| FEB6
| FEB8
| FEB7
| | (also sh) | |
0635
| FEB9
| FEBA
| FEBC
| FEBB
| | | |
0636
| FEBD
| FEBE
| FEC0
| FEBF
| | | |
0637
| FEC1
| FEC2
| FEC4
| FEC3
| | | |
0638
| FEC5
| FEC6
| FEC8
| FEC7
| | | / |
0639
| FEC9
| FECA
| FECC
| FECB
| | | |
063A
| FECD
| FECE
| FED0
| FECF
| | (also gh) | |
0641
| FED1
| FED2
| FED4
| FED3
| | | |
0642
| FED5
| FED6
| FED8
| FED7
| | | |
0643
| FED9
| FEDA
| FEDC
| FEDB
| | | |
0644
| FEDD
| FEDE
| FEE0
| FEDF
| | | , ( in ''Allah'' only) |
0645
| FEE1
| FEE2
| FEE4
| FEE3
| | | |
0646
| FEE5
| FEE6
| FEE8
| FEE7
| | | |
0647
| FEE9
| FEEA
| FEEC
| FEEB
| | | |
0648
| FEED
| FEEE
| — | | / | / |
064A
| FEF1
| FEF2
| FEF4
| FEF3
| | / | / |
06A9
| FB8E
| FB8F
| FB91
| FB90
| | | KEHEH |
0686
| FB7A
| FB7B
| FB7D
| FE7C
| | | TCHEH |
Letters lacking an initial or medial version are never tied to the following letter, even within a word. As to
''hamza'', it has only a single graphic, since it is never tied to a preceding or following letter. However, it is sometimes 'seated' on a waw, ya or alif, and in that case the seat behaves like an ordinary waw, ya or alif.
Modified letters
The following are not actual letters, but rather different orthographical shapes for letters.
General
Unicode | Conditional forms | Name | Translit. | Phonemic Value (IPA) |
|---|
| Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial |
|---|
0622
| FE81
| FE82
| — | | | |
0629
| FE93
| FE94
| — | | or / h / | , |
0649
| FEEF
| FEF0
| — | ("broken alif") (Arabic)
(see note below) | / | |
06CC
| FBFC
| FBFD
| FBFF
| FBFE
| (Persian, Urdu)
(see note below) | / | |
;Notes:
The ("broken alif") commonly using Unicode 0x0649 () in Arabic, is sometimes replaced in
Persian or Urdu, with Unicode 0x06CC (ی), called "Persian Yeh". This is appropriate to its pronunciation in those languages. The glyphs are identical in isolated and final form (ﻯ ﻰ), but not in initial and medial form, in which the Persian Yeh gains two dots below (ﻳ ﻴ) while the has neither an initial nor a medial form.
Although this is the common situation, the problem is not so simple, and no solution is met yet at the time of September, 2007
[1].
Ligatures
The only compulsory
ligature is '' + ''. All other ligatures (''+'', etc.) are optional.
★ (isolated) '' + '' ('' ) :
::
★ (final) '' + '' ('' ) :
::
Unicode has a special glyph for the ligature '' (“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 '', because it should compose a small '' sign above a gemination '' sign. Compare the display of the composed equivalents below (the exact outcome will depend on your browser and font configuration):
★ '', (geminated) '' (with implied short-a vowel), (vowel reversed) '' :
::
★ '', '', (geminated) '' (with implied short-a vowel), (vowel reversed) '' :
::
Hamza
Main articles: Hamza
Initially, the letter '' indicated an occlusive glottal, or glottal stop, transcribed by , confirming the alphabet came from the same
Phoenician origin. Now it is used in the same manner as in other
abjads, with '' and '', as a ''
mater lectionis'', that is to say, a consonant standing in for a long vowel (see below). In fact, over the course of time its original consonantal value has been obscured, since '' now serves either as a long vowel or as graphic support for certain diacritics (madda or hamza).
The Arabic alphabet now uses the ''
hamza'' to indicate a
glottal stop, which can appear anywhere in a word. This letter, however, does not function like the others: it can be written alone or on a support in which case it becomes a diacritic:
★ alone: ;
★ with a support: (above and under a ''), (above a ''), (above a dotless '' or '').
Diacritics
Shadda
Main articles: Shadda
The '' (
◌ ) marks the
gemination (doubling) of a consonant; a (
◌ ) vowel sign (when present) moves to between the geminated (doubled) consonant and the ''.
The w-shaped '' glyph above the second consonant that it geminates, is in fact the beginning of a small '' letter.
General
Unicode | Name is | Translit. | Phonetic Value (IPA) |
|---|
0651
◌ | | (consonant doubled) | |
''Sukūn'' and above
An Arabic syllable can be open (ended by a vowel) or closed (ended by a consonant).
★ open: CV[consonant-vowel] (long or short vowel)
★ closed: CVC (short vowel only)
When the syllable is closed, we can indicate that the consonant that closes it does not carry a vowel by marking it with a sign called '' ( ) to remove any ambiguity, especially when the text is not vocalised: it's necessary to remember that a standard text is only composed of series of consonants; thus, the word '', "heart", is written ''. The sukūn is also used for transliterating words to Arabic script. The Persian word (mâsk, from the English word mask), for example, might be written with a sukūn above the to signify that there is no vowel sound between that letter and the .
'' allows us to know where not to place a vowel: '' could, in effect, be read ''qalab'' (meaning "he turned around"), but written with a ''sukūn'' over the '' and the '', it can only be interpreted as the form ''/qVlb/''; we write this . This is one stage from full vocalization, where the ''a'' vowel would also be indicated by a : ,
The '' is traditionally written in full vocalization. Outside of the '', putting a '' above a '' which indicates , or above a '' which stands for is extremely rare, to the point that '' with sukūn will be unambiguously read as the diphthong , and '' with '' will be read .
The letters '' ( with an '' at the end of the word)
will be read most naturally as the word '' (“music”). If you were to write '' above the '', '' and '', you’d get , which would be read as '' (note however that the final '' is an '' and never takes ''). The word, entirely vocalised, would be written in the '' (if it happened to appear there!), or elsewhere. (The Quranic spelling would have no '' sign above the final '', but instead a miniature '' above the preceding '' consonant, which is a valid
Unicode character but most Arabic computer fonts cannot in fact display this miniature '' as of 2006.)
A '' is not placed on word-final consonants, even if no vowel is pronounced, because fully vocalised texts are always written as if the ''
i`rab'' vowels were in fact pronounced. For example, '', meaning “Ahmed is a bad husband”, for the purposes of Arabic grammar and orthography, is treated as if still pronounced with full ''i`rab'', i.e. '' with the complete
desinences.
General
Unicode | Name | Translit. | Phonemic Value (IPA) |
|---|
0652
◌ | | (no vowel with this consonant letter or
diphthong with this long vowel letter) | Ø / |
0670
◌ | | (no vowel with next final consonant letter or
diphthong with next final long vowel letter) | Ø / |
Vowels
Main articles: Harakat
Arabic short vowels are generally not written, except in sacred texts (such as the , where they ''must'' be written) and sometimes in didactics, which are known as vocalised texts.
Before the introduction of printing, occasionally short vowels would be marked where the word would otherwise be ambiguous and could not be resolved simply from context, or simply wherever they looked nice. This custom has now all but disappeared, to the point that many Arabs believe (wrongly) that the use of vowel marks is forbidden outside of the Quran. Most software (such as most text editors and all mobile phones) does not allow the writer to add short vowels, and displays them illegibly if at all.
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 '' — or a word like ''.)
Short vowels
(fully vocalized text) | Name | Trans. | Value |
|---|
064E
◌ | | | |
064F
◌ | | | |
0650
◌ | | | |
Long "a" following a consonant other than hamzah is written with a short-"a" mark on the consonant plus an alif after it (''). Long "i" is a mark for short "i" plus a yaa , and long u is mark for short u plus waaw, so aā = ā, iy = ī and uw = ū); long "a" following a hamzah sound may be represented by an alif-madda or by a floating hamzah followed by an alif.
In the table below, vowels will be placed above or below a dotted circle replacing a primary consonant letter or shadda. Please note, that most consonants (except 6 of them) do join to the left with '', '' and '' written then with their medial or final form. Additionally, the '' letter in the last row may connect to the letter on its left, and then will use a medial or initial form. 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. Use the table of primary letters to look at their actual glyph and joining types.
Long vowels
(fully vocalized text) | Name | Trans. | Value |
|---|
064E 0627
◌ | | | |
064E 0649
◌ | | / | |
064E 06CC
◌ | | / | |
064F 0648
◌ | | / | |
0650 064A
◌ | | / | |
In an un-vocalised text (one in which the short vowels are not marked), the long vowels are represented by the consonant in question : , (or ), , . Long vowels written in the middle of a word of un-vocalized text are treated like consonants taking ''sukūn'' (see below) in a text that has full diacritics. Here also, the table shows long vowel letters only in isolated form for clarity.
Long vowels
(un-vocalized text) | Name | Trans. | Value |
|---|
0627
| | | |
0649
| | / | |
06CC
| | / | |
0648
| | / | |
064A
| | / | |
| ''tanwiin letters:'' |
| used to write the grammatical endings and respectively for desinences with nunation in indefinite state (see I`rab) in Arabic. is most commonly written in combination with alif () or taa' marbūta. |
Numerals
Main articles: Eastern Arabic numerals
There are two kinds of numerals used in Arabic writing; standard numerals and "East Arab" numerals, used in
Iran,
Pakistan and
India. In Arabic, these numbers are referred to as "Indian numbers" ( ''). In most of present-day North Africa, the usual Western numerals are used; in medieval times, a slightly different set (from which, via Italy, Western "Arabic numerals" derive) was used. Like Arabic alphabetic characters, Arabic numerals are written from right to left, though the units are always right-most, and the highest value left-most, just as with Western "Arabic numerals". Telephone numbers are read from left to right.
★ Standard form of numeral 2 in Egypt is slightly different
In addition, the Arabic alphabet can be used to represent numbers (
Abjad numerals), a usage rare today. This usage is based on the
Abjadi order of the alphabet. '' is 1, '' is 2, '' is 3, and so on until '' = 10, '' = 20, '' = 30, …, '' = 200, …, '' = 1000. This is sometimes used to produce
chronograms.
History
Main articles: History of the Arabic alphabet
The Arabic alphabet can be traced back to the
Nabatean alphabet used to write the
Nabataean dialect of
Aramaic, itself descended from Phoenician. The first known text in the Arabic alphabet is a late fourth-century inscription from
Jabal Ramm (50 km east of
Aqaba), but the first dated one is a trilingual inscription at
Zebed in
Syria from 512. However, the
epigraphic record is extremely sparse, with only five certainly
pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions surviving, though some others may be pre-Islamic. Later, dots were added above and below the letters to differentiate them (the Aramaic model had fewer phonemes than the Arabic, and some originally distinct Aramaic letters had become indistinguishable in shape, so in the early writings 15 distinct letter-shapes had to do duty for 28 sounds!) The first surviving document that definitely uses these dots is also the first surviving Arabic
papyrus (
PERF 558), dated April 643, although they did not become obligatory until much later. Important texts like the
Qurʼan were frequently
memorized; this practice, which survives even today, probably arose partially from a desire to avoid the great ambiguity of the script.
Yet later, vowel signs and
hamzas were added, beginning sometime in the last half of the
seventh century, roughly contemporaneous with the first invention of Syriac and Hebrew
vocalization. Initially, this was done by a system of red dots, said to have been commissioned by an
Umayyad governor of
Iraq,
Hajjaj ibn Yusuf: a dot above = ''a'', a dot below = ''i'',
a dot on the line = ''u'', and doubled dots gave ''tanwin''. However, this was cumbersome and easily confusable with the letter-distinguishing dots, so about 100 years later, the modern system was adopted. The system was finalized around 786 by
al-Farahidi.
Arabic alphabets of other languages
| Worldwide use of the Arabic alphabet |
|---|
 Arabic alphabet world distribution. | |
| | → Countries where the Arabic script is the only official orthography |
| | → Countries where the Arabic script is used alongside other orthographies. |
Arabic script has been adopted for use in a wide variety of languages other than Arabic, including
Persian,
Kurdish,
Malay and
Urdu. Such adaptations may feature altered or new characters to represent
phonemes that do not appear in Arabic
phonology. For example, the Arabic language lacks a [p] phoneme, so many languages add their own letter to represent [p] in the script, though the specific letter used varies from language to language. These modifications tend to fall into groups: all the
Indian and
Turkic languages written in Arabic script tend to use the
Persian modified letters, whereas
Indonesian languages tend to imitate those of
Jawi. The modified version of the Arabic script originally devised for use with Persian is known as the '
Perso-Arabic script' by scholars.
Use of Arabic script in
West African languages, especially in the Sahel, developed with the penetration of Islam. To a certain degree the style and usage tends to follow those of the
Maghreb (for instance the position of dots in the fa and qaf letters). Additional diacritics have come into use to facilitate writing of sounds not represented in the Arabic language. The term "
Ajami," which comes from the Arabic root for "stranger" has been applied to Arabic-based orthographies of African languages.
Current uses of the alphabet for languages other than Arabic
Today Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and China are the main non-Arab states using the Arabic alphabet to write one or more official national languages, including Persian, Dari, Pashto, Urdu, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Uyghur.
The Arabic alphabet is currently used for:
Middle East and Central Asia
★
Kurdish and
Turkmen in Northern
Iraq. (In
Turkey and
Syria, the
Latin alphabet is now used for Kurdish);
★
Official language Persian and regional languages including
Azeri,
Kurdish and
Baluchi in
Iran;
★ Official languages
Dari (which differs only to a minor degree from Persian) and
Pashto and all regional languages including
Uzbek in
Afghanistan;
★
Tajik also differs only to a minor degree from Persian, and while in
Tajikistan the usual
Tajik alphabet is an extended
Cyrillic alphabet, there is also some use of Arabic-alphabet Persian books from Iran
★
Uyghur changed to Roman script in 1969 and back to a simplified, fully voweled, Arabic script in 1983;
★
Kazakh is written in Arabic in Pakistan, Iran, China, and Afghanistan; and
★
Kyrgyz is written in Arabic by the 150,000 in the
Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest
China.
East Asia
★ The
Chinese language is written by some
Hui in the Arabic-derived
Xiao'erjing alphabet.
South Asia
★ Official language
Urdu and regional languages including
Punjabi (where the script is known as
Shahmukhi),
Sindhi,
Kashmiri, and
Balochi in
Pakistan;
★
Urdu and
Kashmiri in
India. Urdu is one of several official languages in the states of
Jammu and Kashmir,
Delhi,
Uttar Pradesh,
Bihar and
Andhra Pradesh; see
List of national languages of India.
Kashmiri also uses
Sharada script;
★ The
Arwi language known as Arabic-Tamil uses the Arabic script together with the addition of 13 letters. It is mainly used in Sri Lanka and the South Indian states of Tamilnadu and Kerala for religious purposes.
★ The
Thaana script used to write the
Dhivehi language in the
Maldives has vowels derived from the vowel diacritics of the Arabic script. Some of the consonants are borrowed from Arabic numerals.
Southeast Asia
★
Malay in the Arabic script known as
Jawi is co-official in
Brunei, and used for religious purposes in
Malaysia,
Indonesia,
Southern Thailand,
Singapore, and predominantly Muslim areas of the
Philippines.
Africa
★
Bedawi or Beja, mainly in northeastern
Sudan
★
Comorian (Comorian) in the
Comoros, currently side by side with the
Latin alphabet (neither is official);
★
Hausa for many purposes, especially religious (known as ''
Ajami'');
★
Mandinka, widely but unofficially (known as ''
Ajami''); (another non-Latin alphabet used is
N'Ko)
★
Fula, especially the Pular of Guinea(known as ''
Ajami'');
★
Wolof (at
zaouias), known as ''
Wolofal''.
★
Tamazight and other
Berber languages were traditionally written in Arabic in the
Maghreb. There is now a competing 'revival' of neo-
Tifinagh.
Former uses of the alphabet for languages other than Arabic
Speakers of languages that were previously unwritten used Arabic script as a basis to design writing systems for their mother languages. This choice could be influenced by Arabic being their second language, the language of scripture of their faith, or the only written language they came in contact with. Additionally, since most education was once religious, choice of script was determined by the writer's religion; which meant that Muslims would use Arabic script to write whatever language they spoke. This led to Arabic script being the most widely used script during the Middle Ages. See also
Languages of Muslim countries.
In the 20th century, Arabic script was generally replaced by the
Latin alphabet in the
Balkans, parts of
Sub-Saharan Africa, and
Southeast Asia,
while in the
Soviet Union, after a brief period of Latinization,
[1] use of the
Cyrillic alphabet was mandated.
Turkey changed to the Latin alphabet in 1928 as part of an internal Westernizing revolution. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many of the Turkic languages of the ex-USSR attempted to follow Turkey's lead and convert to a Turkish-style Latin alphabet. However, renewed use of the Arabic alphabet has occurred to a limited extent in
Tajikistan, whose language's close resemblance to
Persian allows direct use of publications from Iran.
[2]
Most languages of the
Iranian languages family continue to use Arabic script, as well as the
Indo-Aryan languages of Pakistan and of Muslim populations in
India, but the
Bengali language of Bangladesh is written in the
Bengali alphabet.
Africa
★
Afrikaans (as it was first written among the "
Cape Malays", see
Arabic Afrikaans);
★
Berber in North Africa, particularly
Tachelhit in
Morocco (still being considered, along with
Tifinagh and Latin for
Tamazight);
★
Harari, by the
Harari people of the
Harari Region in
Ethiopia. Now uses the
Ge'ez alphabet.
★ For the West African languages mentioned above -
Hausa,
Fula,
Mandinka, and
Wolof - the Latin alphabet has officially replaced Arabic transcriptions for use in literacy and education;
★
Malagasy in
Madagascar (script known as
Sorabe);
★
Nubian;
★
Swahili (has used the
Latin alphabet since the 19th century);
★
Somali (has used the
Latin alphabet since 1972);
★
Songhay in West Africa, particularly in
Timbuktu;
★
Yoruba in West Africa (this was probably limited, but still notable)
Europe
★
Albanian;
★
Azeri in
Azerbaijan (now written in the
Latin alphabet and
Cyrillic alphabet scripts in
Azerbaijan);
★
Bosnian (only for literary purposes; presently written in the
Latin alphabet);
★
Polish (among ethnic
Tatars);
★
Belarusian (among ethnic
Tatars; see
Belarusian Arabic alphabet);
★
Mozarabic, when the Moors ruled Spain (and later
Aragonese,
Portuguese, and
Spanish proper; see
aljamiado);
Central Asia and Russian Federation
★
Bashkir (for some years: from
October Revolution (1917) until 1928);
★
Chaghatai across
Central Asia;
★
Chechen (from the adoption of Islam in the XVI century until 1928
[2]);
★
Kazakh in
Kazakhstan (until 1930s, now uses Cyrillic script);
★
Kyrgyz in
Kyrgyzstan (until 1930s, now uses Cyrillic script);
★
Tatar (
iske imlâ) before 1928 (changed to Latin), reformed in 1880s, 1918 (deletion of some letters);
★
Chinese and
Dungan, among the
Hui people (script known as
Xiao'erjing);
★
Turkmen in
Turkmenistan;
★
Uzbek in
Uzbekistan;
★ All the Muslim peoples of the
USSR between 1918-1928 (many also earlier), including
Bashkir,
Chechen,
Kazakh,
Tajik etc. After 1928 their script became Latin, then later Cyrillic.
Southeast Asia
★
Malay in
Malaysia and
Indonesia;
Maguindanaon and
Tausug in the
Philippines.
South Asia
★
Arwi, a
Tamil dialect that was used extensively by the Muslim minority of
Tamil Nadu state of
India and
Sri Lanka.
Middle East
★
Turkish in the
Ottoman Empire was written in Arabic script until
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk declared the change to
Roman script in 1928. This form of Turkish is now known as
Ottoman Turkish and is held by many to be a different language, due to its much higher percentage of Persian and Arabic
loanwords; (
Ottoman Turkish alphabet)
★
Kurdish (Kurmanji dialect) in Turkey and Syria was written in Arabic script until
1932, when a modified Kurdish Latin alphabet was introduced by
Jaladat Ali Badirkhan in Syria.
Computers and the Arabic alphabet
The Arabic alphabet can be encoded using several
character sets, including
ISO-8859-6 and
Unicode, in the latter thanks to the "Arabic segment", entries U+0600 to U+06FF. However, neither of these sets indicate the form each character should take in context. It is left to the
rendering engine to select the proper
glyph to display for each character.
Unicode
Main articles: Arabic Unicode
As of Unicode 5.0, the following ranges encode Arabic characters:
★ (0600–06FF)
★ (0750–077F)
★ (FB50–FDFF)
★ (FE70–FEFF)
The basic Arabic range encodes the standard letters and diacritics, but does not encode contextual forms (U+0621–U+0652 being directly based on
ISO 8859-6); and also includes the most common diacritics and
Arabic-Indic digits. U+06D6 to U+06ED encode qur'anic annotation signs such as "end of ayah" and "start of rub el hizb" . The Arabic Supplement range encodes letter variants mostly used for writing African (non-Arabic) languages. The Arabic Presentation Forms-A range encodes contextual forms and ligatures of letter variants needed for Persian, Urdu, Sindhi and Central Asian languages. The Arabic Presentation Forms-B range encodes spacing forms of Arabic diacritics, and more contextual letter forms.
See also the notes of the section on
modified letters.
Arabic keyboard
Arabic/QWERTY keyboard in
Yemen
Keyboards designed for different nations have different layouts so that proficiency in one style of keyboard such as Iraq's does not transfer to proficiency in another keyboard such as Saudi Arabia's. Differences can include the location of non-alphabetic characters such as '<' as well as the location of vowel marks and possibly other differences.
All Arabic keyboards allow typing Roman characters, e.g. for URL in a
web browser. Thus, each Arabic keyboard has both Arabic and Roman characters marked on the keys. Usually the Roman characters of an Arabic keyboard conform to the
QWERTY layout, but in
North Africa, where
French is the most common language typed using the Roman characters, the Arabic keyboards are
AZERTY.
When one wants to encode a particular written form of a character, there are extra code points provided in Unicode which can be used to express the exact written form desired. The range ''Arabic presentation forms A'' (U+FB50 to U+FDFF) contain ligatures while the range ''Arabic presentation forms B'' (U+FE70 to U+FEFF) contains the positional variants. These effects are better achieved in Unicode by using the ''zero width joiner'' and ''non-joiner'', as these presentation forms are deprecated in Unicode, and should generally only be used within the internals of text-rendering software, when using Unicode as an intermediate form for conversion between character encodings, or for backwards compatibility with implementations that rely on the hard-coding of glyph forms.
Finally, the Unicode encoding of Arabic is in ''logical order'', that is, the characters are entered, and stored in computer memory, in the order that they are written and pronounced without worrying about the direction in which they will be displayed on paper or on the screen. Again, it is left to the rendering engine to present the characters in the correct direction, using Unicode's
bi-directional text features. In this regard, if the Arabic words on this page are written left to right, it is an indication that the Unicode rendering engine used to display them is out-of-date. For more information about encoding Arabic, consult the Unicode manual available at http://www.unicode.org/
★
MULTILINGUAL COMPUTING WITH ARABIC AND ARABIC TRANSLITERATION Arabicizing Windows Applications to Read and Write Arabic & Solutions for the Transliteration Quagmire Faced by Arabic-Script Languages
★
A PowerPoint Tutorial (with screen shots and an English voice-over) on how to add Arabic to the Windows Operating System
Arabic text computerized
The first software program of its kind in the world that identifies Arabic handwriting in real time has been developed by researchers at
Ben-Gurion University.
The prototype enables the user to write Arabic words by hand on an electronic screen, which then analyzes the text and translates it into printed Arabic letters in a thousandth of a second. The error rate is less than three percent, according to Dr. Jihad El-Sana, from BGU's department of computer sciences, who developed the system along with master's degree student Fadi Biadsy.
[3]
Arabic printing presses
Although
Napoleon Bonaparte generally is given the credit with introducing the printing press to the Arab world upon invading Egypt in 1798, and he did indeed bring printing presses and Arabic script presses, to print the French occupation's official newspaper ''Al-Tanbiyyah'' (''The Courier''), the process was started several centuries earlier.
Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1450 was followed up by Gregorio de Gregorii, a Venetian, who in 1514 published an entire prayer book in Arabic script entitled Kitab Salat al-Sawa'i intended for the eastern Christian communities. The script was said to be crude and almost unreadable.
Famed type designer Robert Granjon working for Cardinal Ferdinando de Medici succeeded in designing elegant Arabic typefaces and the Medici press published many Christian prayer and scholarly Arabic texts in the late sixteenth century.
The first Arabic books published using movable type in the Middle East were by the
Maronite monks at the Maar Quz?hayy Monastery in
Mount Lebanon. They transliterated the Arabic language using
Syriac script. It took a fellow goldsmith like Gutenberg to design and implement the first true Arabic script movable type printing press in the Middle East. The
Greek Orthodox monk
Abd Allah Zakhir set up an
Arabic language printing press using
movable type at the monastery of Saint John at the town of
Dhour El Shuwayr in Mount Lebanon, the first home made press in Lebanon using true Arabic script. He personally cut the type molds and did the founding of the elegant typeface. He created the first true Arabic script type in the Middle East. The first book off the press was in 1734; this press continued to be used until 1899.
[4][5]
See also
★
Arabic calligraphy - considered an art form in its own right
★
Arabic numerals
★
Romanization of Arabic
★
Arabic Chat Alphabet
★
ArabTeX - provides Arabic support for
TeX and
LaTeX
★
Harakat
★
Jawi - an adapted Arabic alphabet for the
Malay language
★
South Arabian alphabet
★
History of the Arabic alphabet
References
1. http://www.k2.dion.ne.jp/~oibane/aonl/en/uni-prob.htm
2. http://socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Echechen/Ch_writing.htm
External links
★
The Arabic Alphabet showing the different glyphs for each letter and its code position in Unicode
★
Alphabet, with sound, just click on a letter
★
Arabic writing and calligraphy
★
Article about Arabic alphabet
★
Arabic alphabet and calligraphy
★
(freeware) to learn the characters
★
Guide to the use of Arabic in Windows, major word processors and web browsers
★
Learn the Arabic Script Online
★
Madinaharabic.com: Free Arabic Reading and Language Course (with sound)
★
Arabic Alphabet Quiz Choose the "Arabic" link.
★
Babel Arabic Writing Explanation
★
Site on Scripts and Writing Systems: A long list of links to sites dealing with issues of scripts.
★
Arabic alphabet stroke directions
Online Arabic keyboards
★
Arabic Keyboard adapted to QWERTY (ISLAM-91)
★
clavier arabe en ligne LEXILOGOS (French)
★
Muftah-Alhuruf.com: Write and send Arabic emails without having an Arabic keyboard or operating system.
----
''This article contains major sections of text from the very detailed article from the French Wikipedia, which has been partially translated into English. Further translation of that page, and its incorporation into the text here, are welcomed.''
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