Thursday, May 24, 2007

Arabic Alphabet

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.


The special AbjadÄ« 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) — leaving six remaining Arabic letters at the end.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is from Wikipedia, right?

Satori said...

Yes it is from Wikipedia.

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