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.
The Hebrew alphabet, known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. It is also used informally in Israel to write Levantine Arabic, especially among Druze. It is an offshoot of the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, which flourished during the Achaemenid Empire and which itself derives from the Phoenician alphabet.
Thaana, Taana or Tāna is the present writing system of the Maldivian language spoken in the Maldives. Thaana has characteristics of both an abugida and a true alphabet, with consonants derived from indigenous and Arabic numerals, and vowels derived from the vowel diacritics of the Arabic abjad. Maldivian orthography in Thaana is largely phonemic.
Buginese or Bugis is a language spoken by about five million people mainly in the southern part of Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Makassarese, sometimes called Makasar, Makassar, or Macassar, is a language of the Makassarese people, spoken in South Sulawesi province of Indonesia. It is a member of the South Sulawesi group of the Austronesian language family, and thus closely related to, among others, Buginese.
The Tamil script is an abugida script that is used by Tamils and Tamil speakers in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and elsewhere to write the Tamil language. It is one of the official scripts of the Indian Republic. Certain minority languages such as Saurashtra, Badaga, Irula and Paniya are also written in the Tamil script.
Iteration marks are characters or punctuation marks that represent a duplicated character or word.
The Persian alphabet is the right-to-left alphabet used for the Persian language. It is a modification of the Arabic alphabet with four additional letters added: چ پ ژ گ. It was the basis of many Arabic-based scripts used in Central and South Asia. It is used for the Iranian and Dari standard varieties of Persian; and is one of two official writing systems for the Persian language, along side the Cyrillic-based Tajik alphabet.
Diacritical marks of two dots¨, placed side-by-side over or under a letter, are used in a number of languages for several different purposes. The most familiar to English language speakers are the diaeresis and the umlaut, though there are numerous others. For example, in Albanian, ë represents a schwa. Such dots are also sometimes used for stylistic reasons.
Gaf, or gāf, can be the name of different Perso-Arabic letters, all representing. They are all forms of the letter kāf, with additional diacritics, such as dots and lines. There are four forms, each used in different places:
The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy. It was adopted by the Etruscans and subsequently by the Romans. Several Latin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet.
The Urdu alphabet, is the right-to-left alphabet used for the Urdu language. It is a modification of the Persian script, which is itself a derivative of the Arabic script. It is the most widely used script in Pakistan being the official script for the national language, Urdu and several regional languages. It also has status as one of the official scripts of the Indian Republic, used as a minority script in the country. The Urdu alphabet has up to 39 or 40 distinct letters with no distinct letter cases and is typically written in the calligraphic Nastaʿlīq script, whereas Arabic is more commonly written in the Naskh style.
The Lontara script, also known as the Bugis script, Bugis-Makassar script, or Urupu Sulapa’ Eppa’ "four-cornered letters", is one of Indonesia's traditional scripts developed in the South Sulawesi region. The script is primarily used to write the Buginese language, followed by Makassarese and Mandar. Closely related variants of Lontara are also used to write several languages outside of Sulawesi such as Bima, Ende, and Sumbawa. The script was actively used by several South Sulawesi societies for day-to-day and literary texts from at least mid-15th Century CE until the mid-20th Century CE, before its function was gradually supplanted by the Latin alphabet. Today the script is taught in South Sulawesi Province as part of the local curriculum, but with very limited usage in everyday life.
In Unicode and the UCS, a compatibility character is a character that is encoded solely to maintain round-trip convertibility with other, often older, standards. As the Unicode Glossary says:
A character that would not have been encoded except for compatibility and round-trip convertibility with other standards
In Unicode, a script is a collection of letters and other written signs used to represent textual information in one or more writing systems. Some scripts support one and only one writing system and language, for example, Armenian. Other scripts support many different writing systems; for example, the Latin script supports English, French, German, Italian, Vietnamese, Latin itself, and several other languages. Some languages make use of multiple alternate writing systems and thus also use several scripts; for example, in Turkish, the Arabic script was used before the 20th century but transitioned to Latin in the early part of the 20th century. For a list of languages supported by each script, see the list of languages by writing system. More or less complementary to scripts are symbols and Unicode control characters.
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 were combined. The rules governing ligature formation in Arabic can be quite complex, requiring special script-shaping technologies such as the Arabic Calligraphic Engine by Thomas Milo's DecoType.
The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and used widely in international communication. They are the same letters that comprise the current English alphabet. Since medieval times, they are also the same letters of the modern Latin alphabet. The order is also important for sorting words into alphabetical order.
Pegon was a modified Arabic script used to write the Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese languages, as an alternative to the Latin script or the Javanese script and the old Sundanese script. In particular, it was used for religious (Islamic) writing and poetry from the fifteenth century, particularly in writing commentaries of the Qur'an. Pegon includes symbols for sounds that are not present in Modern Standard Arabic. Pegon has been studied far less than its Jawi counterpart which is used for Malay, Acehnese and Minangkabau.
The Makasar script, also known as Ukiri' Jangang-jangang or Old Makasar script, is a historical Indonesian Writing system that was used in South Sulawesi to write the Makassarese language between the 17th and 19th centuries until it was supplanted by the Lontara Bugis script.
