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The Arabic alphabet, [a] or the Arabic abjad, is the Arabic script as specifically codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right-to-left in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters, [b] of which most have contextual letterforms. Unlike the modern Latin alphabet, the script has no concept of letter case.
Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Arabic ʾalif ا , Aramaic ʾālap 𐡀, Hebrew ʾālef א , North Arabian 𐪑, Phoenician ʾālep 𐤀, Syriac ʾālap̄ ܐ.
[1] [2] As Wright notes "[alif] was at first more rarely marked than the other long vowels, and hence it happens that, at a later period, after the invention of the vowel-points, it was indicated in some very common words merely by a fatḥa [i.e. the dagger alif.]" [3] Most keyboards do not have dagger alif.
The Nabataean alphabet was designed to write 22 phonemes, but Arabic has 28 consonant phonemes; thus, when used to write the Arabic language, 6 of its letters must each represent two phonemes: d د also represented ḏ ذ ,
The Arabic script can, therefore, be used as a true alphabet as well as an abjad, although it is often strongly, if erroneously, connected to the latter due to it being originally used only for Arabic. Use of the Arabic script in West African languages, especially in the Sahel, developed with the spread of Islam.
Many scripts in Unicode, such as Arabic, have special orthographic rules that require certain combinations of letterforms to be combined into special ligature forms.In English, the common ampersand (&) developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters e and t (spelling et, Latin for and) were combined. [1]
Arabic verb morphology includes augmentations of the root, also known as forms, an example of the derived stems found among the Semitic languages. For a typical verb based on a triliteral root (i.e. a root formed using three root consonants), the basic form is termed Form I, while the augmented forms are known as Form II, Form III, etc. The ...
There is a continuous range of "in-between" spoken varieties: from nearly pure Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), to a form that still uses MSA grammar and vocabulary but with colloquial influence, to a form of the colloquial language that imports a number of words and grammatical constructions in MSA, to a form that is close to pure colloquial but ...