The hijā’ī ( هِجَائِي) or alifbāʾī ( أَلِفْبَائِي) order, used where lists of names and words are sorted, as in phonebooks, classroom lists, and dictionaries, groups letters by similarity of shape.
In this order, letters are also used as numbers, Abjad numerals, and possess the same alphanumeric code/ cipher as Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy. The original ʾabjadīy order ( أَبْجَدِيّ), used for lettering, derives from the order of the Phoenician alphabet, and is therefore similar to the order of other Phoenician-derived alphabets, such as the Hebrew alphabet. There are two main collating sequences for the Arabic alphabet: abjad and hija. The letter ن (n) also has the same form in initial and medial forms, with one dot above, though it is somewhat different in isolated and final form.īoth printed and written Arabic are cursive, with most of the letters within a word directly connected to the adjacent letters. For example, the Arabic letters ب (b), ت (t) and ث (th) have the same basic shape, but have one dot below, two dots above and three dots above, respectively. These dots are an integral part of a letter, since they distinguish between letters that represent different sounds. Many letters look similar but are distinguished from one another by dots ( ʾiʿjām) above or below their central part ( rasm). There are no distinct upper and lower case letter forms. Adaptations of the Arabic script for other languages added and removed some letters, as for example Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Kurdish, Urdu, Sindhi, Azerbaijani (in Iran), Malay, Pashto, Punjabi, Uyghur, Arwi and Arabi Malayalam, all of which have additional letters as shown below. The basic Arabic alphabet contains 28 letters. As with other impure abjads, such as the Hebrew alphabet, scribes later devised means of indicating vowel sounds by separate vowel diacritics. The Arabic alphabet is considered an abjad, meaning it only uses consonants, but it is now considered an " impure abjad". Most letters have contextual letterforms. It is written from right to left in a cursive style and includes 28 letters. BCEĪdlam (slight influence from Arabic) 1989 CE Caucasian Albanian (origin uncertain) c.Cherokee (syllabary letter forms only) c.Let’s check out some examples:ĭid you notice the word “Hamas” in the examples? The Palestinian organization “Hamas” actually means “Enthusiasm” in Arabic. Some letters don't change much from one form to the other. Let's see examples of some letters in their 4 different forms:
So, Arabic letters occur in 4 different forms: initial, medial, final, and isolated. Arabic is written from right to left in a cursive style, That’s due to the cursive nature of Arabic text. It can make the alphabet seem like much more than 28 letters! But many learners wonder why letters look different in different parts of a word. There are 28 letters in the Arabic alphabet. The question for this lesson is: How come Arabic has many forms of the same letter? Welcome to Ask a Teacher, where I’ll answer some of your most common Arabic questions.
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