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The Arabic alphabet, or Arabic abjad, is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing Arabic. It is written from right to left in a cursive style and includes 28 letters. Most letters have contextual letterforms.
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter or basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός, from διακρίνω. Diacritic is primarily an adjective, though sometimes used as a noun, whereas diacritical is only ever an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute ( ´ ) and grave ( ` ), are often called accents. Diacritical marks may appear above or below a letter, or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters.
In the spelling of Hebrew and some other Semitic languages, matres lectionis are certain consonants that are used to indicate a vowel. The letters that do this in Hebrew are alephא, heה, wawו and yodי. The yod and waw in particular are more often vowels than they are consonants.
A macron is a diacritical mark: it is a straight bar (¯) placed above a letter, usually a vowel. Its name derives from Ancient Greek μακρόν (makrón) "long", since it was originally used to mark long or heavy syllables in Greco-Roman metrics. It now more often marks a long vowel. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the macron is used to indicate a mid-tone; the sign for a long vowel is instead a modified triangular colon ⟨ː⟩.
The circumflex is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from Latin circumflexus "bent around"—a translation of the Greek περισπωμένη (perispōménē). The circumflex in the Latin script is chevron-shaped, while the Greek circumflex may be displayed either like a tilde or like an inverted breve.
A breve is the diacritic mark ˘, shaped like the bottom half of a circle. As used in Ancient Greek, it is also called vrachy, or brachy. It resembles the caron but is rounded; the caron has a sharp tip.
Â, â (a-circumflex) is a letter of the Inari Sami, Romanian, and Vietnamese alphabets. This letter also appears in French, Friulian, Frisian, Portuguese, Turkish, Walloon, and Welsh languages as a variant of letter “a”.
The Arabic script has numerous diacritics, including i'jam, consonant pointing, and tashkil, supplementary diacritics. The latter include the ḥarakāt (حَرَكَات) vowel marks - singular: ḥarakah (حَرَكَة).
DIN 31635 is a Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN) standard for the transliteration of the Arabic alphabet adopted in 1982. It is based on the rules of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (DMG) as modified by the International Orientalist Congress 1935 in Rome. The most important differences from English-based systems were doing away with j, because it stood for in the English-speaking world and for in the German-speaking world and the entire absence of digraphs like th, dh, kh, gh, sh. Its acceptance relies less on its official status than on its elegance and the Geschichte der arabischen Literatur manuscript catalogue of Carl Brockelmann and the dictionary of Hans Wehr. Today it is used in most German-language publications of Arabic and Islamic studies.
The Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language since the 1st century AD. It is one of the Semitic abjads descending from the Aramaic alphabet through the Palmyrene alphabet, and shares similarities with the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic and the traditional Mongolian scripts.
Tausug is a regional language spoken in the province of Sulu in the Philippines, and in the eastern area of the state of Sabah, Malaysia by the Tausūg people.
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may have arisen from one etymologically, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most other dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in many of the world's languages and dialects, for instance in Arabic, Finnish, Fijian, Kannada, Japanese, Latin, Old English, Scottish Gaelic and Vietnamese. It plays a phonetic role in the majority of dialects of British English and is said to be phonemic in a few other dialects, such as Australian English, South African English and New Zealand English. It also plays a lesser phonetic role in Cantonese, unlike other varieties of Chinese.
Yodh is the tenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Yōd
Aleph is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʾālep 𐤀, Hebrew ʾālef א, Aramaic ʾālap 𐡀, Syriac ʾālap̄ ܐ, and Arabic alif ا. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱, and Ge'ez ʾälef አ.
The romanization of Arabic writes written and spoken Arabic in the Latin script in one of various systematic ways. Romanized Arabic is used for a number of different purposes, among them transcription of names and titles, cataloging Arabic language works, language education when used moreover or alongside the Arabic script, and representation of the language in scientific publications by linguists. These formal systems, which often make use of diacritics and non-standard Latin characters and are used in academic settings or for the benefit of non-speakers, contrast with informal means of written communication used by speakers such as the Latin-based Arabic chat alphabet.
The Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic is an Arabic-English dictionary compiled by Hans Wehr and edited by J Milton Cowan.
In the context of the recitation of the Quran, tajwīd is a set of rules for the correct pronunciation of the letters with all their qualities and applying the various traditional methods of recitation (Qira'at). In Arabic, the term tajwīd is derived from the triliteral root j-w-d, meaning enhancement or to make something excellent. Technically, it means giving every letter its right in reciting the Qur'an.
The Urdu alphabet is the right-to-left alphabet used for the Urdu language. It is a modification of the Persian alphabet, which is itself a derivative of the Arabic alphabet. The Urdu alphabet has 39 or 40 letters plus digraphs. The Urdu alphabet has no distinct letter cases, is typically written in the calligraphic Nastaliq script, whereas Arabic is more commonly in the Naskh style.
Hamza (ء) is a letter in the Arabic alphabet, representing the glottal stop. Hamza is not one of the 28 "full" letters and owes its existence to historical inconsistencies in the standard writing system. It is derived from the Arabic letter ʿAyn (ع). In the Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, from which the Arabic alphabet is descended, the glottal stop was expressed by alif, continued by Alif in the Arabic alphabet. However, Alif was used to express both a glottal stop and also a long vowel. In order to indicate that a glottal stop is used, and not a mere vowel, it was added to Alif diacritically. In modern orthography, hamza may also appear on the line, under certain circumstances as though it were a full letter, independent of an Alif. In Unicode it is at the code point U+0621 and named ARABIC LETTER HAMZA.
The Pashto alphabet is transliterated vis-à-vis Perso-Arabic scriptural denotation with additional glyphs added to accommodate phonemes used in Pashto.
References
- Wehr, Hans. Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic .