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For users needing assistance with Arabic script, please add requests at Wikipedia:WikiProject Arab world/Requests for Arabic script.
Talk:Arabic alphabet/from the French Wikipedia - temp page moved into talk namespace, as per policy.
Currently the page says jeem can be pronounced either as ʒ or dʒ. However, shouldn't the dʒ be linking to Voiced palato-alveolar affricate instead of referring to d and ʒ separately? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.93.53.136 ( talk) 23:17, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
I interpret the second key on map to indicates countries where arabic script and adapted script, may be used (even if not official - eg- India and China are shown light green on map). The accompanying paragraph to map refers to Indonesia and Malaysia, but both omitted as light green on map. Article on Jawi script also says South Philippines, Sth Thailand, Brunei & Singapore may use this script. Jawi is official script in Brunei. ````
In experimenting with the localization features of Windows XP, I see that there isn't a single "Arabic keyboard". For example, the "Arabic - Iraq" keyboard has ذ ّ in the key to the left of the Qwerty '1'/'!', while "Arabic - Saudi Arabia" has < >. There are other more important changes between those two such as the location of vowel marks (I don't know the right terminology) in the position of the uppercase Qwerty keys X C V.
I haven't experimented with the other keyboard layouts beside Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to see how many other national variants exist.
I'm not at all sure how to reflect that in the article. I made a small note in the article, but it deserves to be explained in more detail.
Bill Smith 18:30, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
This is a terrible article on what is arguably a very important subject. Its structure and language are both dense and pedantic, and concepts that require special clarification are inadequately developed. Too many subjects are discussed in tandem - there should be a much clearer demarcation of each example. As well, the arabic glyphs are currently in a format much too small to be comprehended. It is at present nearly opaque to the linguistic non-specialist, which is hardly appropriate for Wikipedia.
Can anyone contribute to a list of languages commonly written in Arabic alphabet? I know Urdu is, and of course Arabic. I think the entry should also include a note that the Qur'an is written in the Arabic alphabet.
::: I should say that arabic is not restricted to the three vowels ( A,o,I) as many people would think, there are (Tashkeel) which is a vital element in the language (Dhamma, fat'haa, Kasrah), basically, arabic is easily adapted to any other language, especially, that there are new (not commonly used) letters, for instance, P can be written in arabic like the second letter in the arabic alphabet (Baa') except with three dots beneath instead of one. I disagree with the statement, that arabic is a difficult language, and isn't flexible. Once you cross the pronounciation barrier, then it is matter of some vocabulary and grammar, and you can speak the language fluently, it is just like any other language really, but to completely master the language,it'll require a lifetime, but we don't need to master a language in order to speak it, do we ??
I think the table of Unicode codes should go elsewhere, something like "Unicode codes from the Arabic alphabet". It clutters the article, not everyone will be interested in this technical matter.
I may do the move in a few days if no one protests.
FvdP 20:56 Oct 11, 2002 (UTC)
Seconded. I have limited internet access, though, and cannot keep a computer for long enough to do such a thing. Scott Paeth 05:27, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
I have started a merge of the Arabic examples from the German Wikipedia Karada
From the German version (crudely translated):
Is this correct? Karada
You need to do the HTML Unicode in decimal, not hexadecimal. Using hexadecimal reduces even further the number of browsers on which it will work. -- Zundark 21:17 Jan 5, 2003 (UTC)
The French Wikipedia article really is much better than this one. Does anyone want to start the process of translating the French article to English? -- The Anome 10:52, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)
See
Arabic alphabet/from the French Wikipedia for a start on this translation process. Anyone want to translate a paragraph? --
The Anome 13:32, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Can anyone tell me how to write articles using Arabic script? I have absolutely no idea on how to do it! ThaGrind 02:48, 21 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Took the liberty to change ta to dal د in the vowels section for clarity. There was no reason to use ta, write it incorrectly and mislead the surfers. Jeru 17:18, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)
---
There's a good list of languages using the Arabic script in the Arabic language article, for some reason. I'll see if I can find them a place here. - Mustafaa 18:00, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)
When the moors ruled Spain they ruled Spain and Portugal and there was no spanish language. People spoke Latin in several variations, possibly dialectal, all called "Vulgar Latin". The emergence and separation of the national languages in the Iberian Peninsula happened for the most part in the last 1000 years. -- 213.22.166.118 03:13, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
And the end of Moorish rule happened 500 years ago... - Mustafaa 09:37, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Well, Mozarabic language was certainly used - but are you sure Spanish wasn't used as well towards the end? For instance, Arabic-Islamic.org describes Aljamiado as "lengua castellana escrita con grafía árabe" (in 1462, that is). - Mustafaa 01:39, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I've changed the entry to reflect this discussion. Let me know what you think. Were there any Portuguese aljamiado manuscripts? - Mustafaa 23:46, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Thanks! What was Safi? By the way, you know anyone can edit here - why not get a user account and start writing some articles yourself? You certainly seem knowledgeable on the subject, and it sounds interesting... - Mustafaa 08:05, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)
--- Persian, Dari, Farsi are all the names for one language i.e. Persian language. In the list these terms were used superfulously, so I edited it. -- Mani1 16:14, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Persian and Farsi may mean the same thing, but Dari is NOT the same language as Farsi.
Aljamía was and still is in essence, the language of the Moorish descendants of Al Andalus, and thus it remains our language, the language of the Muslim mudejáres and moriscos!
(Al Fatiha)
(Çora l'alfátaha)-in aljamía
Nel nomme d'Allah, l'Arrahimo, l'Arrahimano.
1. Alhamdanzas ad Allah, arrabí dellos aílemos.
2. L'Arrahimo, l'Arrahimano.
3. Malico d'Alyamidino.
4. A bós t'albudamos, ed a bós anestainamos.
5. Alhedenáde-mos por l'alçerado almostaquino.
6. L'alçerado d'ellos que hádes almetado.
7. Non allos que amerraban. Ed allos albideros.
Xucrá, Ah'med Birzali!
hi can you show me the arabic alphebet then can you translate it for me? I have this really big project due on ancient islam tomorrow. this would really make my night a lot less hard than it already is. thank you alyssa
As a person who knows aboslutely nothing about Arabic, I find the 'Primary Letters' table to be quite useless. The text is too small to discern the characters, even when I view text in the largest size. Can something be done about this? RealGrouchy 17:13, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)
For those 8 letters marked with no [Medial] or [Initial]: while they don't have a [Medial] form, they do have an [Initial] form which is the same as the [Isolated] form. Should we change the various tables to reflect that? Wael Ellithy ( talk) 10:49, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
Unlike some of the commenters above, I can see all Arabic letters in the text correctly (maybe because I'm using Mozilla SeaMonkey on Linux, and have installed a number of additional fonts, including some for Arabic, and maybe also because my favourite Wikipedia skin is Cologne Blue, which uses larger text than the default Monobook). All the shapes in the table are correct (except of course insofar as isolated and final shapes of non-joining letters are also listed respectively as "initial" and "medial"), however some of the letters are listed with identical Unicode codepoints numbers (for contextual shapes relating to different letters), which cannot be correct. I don't have the time to correct that section now, but the reference PDF pages are http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0600.pdf for common codepoints and http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFE70.pdf for "Presentation forms B" (i.e., distinct codepoints for the various contextual shapes). — Tonymec ( talk) 06:42, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
The Romanization I see most often in Internet use, uses digits in addition to letters, for example 3 for `ayn and 7 for Haa', based on visual similarity of the characters. I'd like information on it. Wikipedia has information on similar ASCII keyboard-friendly Internet transliterations for other non-Roman alphabets, for example Greeklish and Volapuk_encoding.
Since the digit representations are widely used and standardized, they should go back in the table or text. The table currently has as many as 4 transliterations per Arabic letter, some of which are used much less frequently than the digits. Also, the digits are used online where it is not obvious how to find a guide to their meaning, unlike printed academic works which usually include notes about the transliteration they use, if there is any doubt that readers will understand. -- JWB 21:13, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The table also doesn't identify which transliterations of a letter are used by which transliteration system. DIN-31635 and SATTS are also stubs with no info. So effectively there is no info on transliteration systems at all, just a listing of the union of several systems, with emphasis on less used ones. -- JWB 23:32, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
We all thank you for your new-found enthusiasm for the language, but please, please, please be sure of what you write, before you change something.
Someone just removed the dagger alif from 'allah' and replaced it with a fatha. A first-year student, perhaps, who has just learned about the diacritics for the short vowels?
If I get some time, I'll try to clarify the section about the diacritics - the 'harakat' - but in the meantime, PLEASE do not 'fix' anything on your own unless you KNOW you are right.
Thanks. Cbdorsett 15:31, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
The above is complete bullshit. "Alif maqsura" is a grammatical concept in the Arabic language; it is not a letter form. It can be represented by either a dotless ya (ى) or an alif. Furthermore, the dotless ya does not always mean "alif maqsura". The dotless ya is used in Arabic in all four forms. The problem, which can be traced to the stupidity of Unicode, is that a) "character" is not so obvious; and b) letterform shape is distinct from context. E.g. a so-called "initial form" can be used in the middle of a word: قائل for example.
[Well I can't say anything about where if came from or what it meant originally, but I can tell you that the alif letterform serves numerous functions *in the Arabic* writing system; other systems that use Arabic letterforms may do things differently. More to the point, it is *not* a consonant in modern Arabic (or in any Arabic so far as I can tell). Why not ask the locals? They will tell you that, where alif seems to indicate a long vowel, in fact it indicates the doubling of a short vowel, which is not quite the same thing. In other words, alif has *no primary phonological value* whatsoever, ever.]
I just went around lk-ing "vowel point", and in i think one case, "vowel mark" to Niqqud.
In this article the section "Ligatures" says
I made no lk to the Hebrew word
Niqqud, but is there an equivalent lk available or needed? Should this instance of "vowel mark" lk to
Abjad?
--
Jerzy
(t) 20:55, 2005 Mar 24 (UTC)
In the section "Vowels" is the following paragraph:
"Note that when the acute-shaped fatḥa which denotes a short a is added on top of a geminated consonnant (i.e. after a šadda), the fatha accent takes a vertical shape to make the composition more distinctable from the tanwiin vowel sign fatḥatan (which marks a /-an/ ending with indeterminate nunation in fully vocalized texts, see below). For an example, see the encoded ligature for ʻAllah above."
Which is unfortunately, incorrect. A šadda may be accompanied by fatḥa, damma or kasra(written below the šadda or below the letter) of which all may be single or tanwiin(nunated). A single fatḥa above a šadda is not written in a vertical shape. This "vertical shape" is the alif ḫanjariyyah or "dagger alif" which indicates an unwritten alif, as found in allāh or ar-raḥmān where the alif in both of these words is denoted with a ḫanjar rather than a full alif character).
86.136.191.158
21:36, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
Can anyone tell me what the following Arabic phrase would be written in Latin is? The phrase in question is, ما الخليفة أين?
Thanks for the help, I really appreciate it. Kaiser Matias 02:02 Apr 5 2005 (UTC)
Reading the passage about sukun I encountered the use of o in the examples. I have seen this letter also in other transliterations, the majority of transliteration tables do not mention it however, telling about just three vowels - a,i and u. Could this be briefly clarified here too? 80.235.60.55 21:55, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
O is sometimes used in transliterations for damma instead of u: Mohammad, Muhammad. U follows academic transliteration styles (Encyclopedia of Islam, MELA, etc.), o follows how it sounds in some vernaculars.
Just made a couple edits (cells misaligned, non-IPA diacritics in the IPA column, etc.). Also a couple alternate transcriptions. Since the under-dot diacritic doesn't work for all browsers, I added the unicode letters with the under-dot as a second variant. Some people have complained about one and some about the other in the comments above, so hopefully by offering both, at least one version will work for everybody. kwami 21:21, 2005 May 24 (UTC)
I think that the Persian Alphabet article should not be redirected here, and requireds a dedicated article, since the Persian alphabet has additional letters and different sounds. Likewise, there should be a note in the article indicating that Geem is the Egyptian pronounciation for Jeem, as it is known in the rest of the Arab world, and in Fusha and Classical Arabic. DigiBullet 19:14, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
First of all, is خ really a fricative-trill combination? I thought it was a pure uvular fricative.
Second, ɢ for ق is simply not within the recorded variability of MSA; in modern Arabic, it's q or g, though in Sibawayh's time it may have been ɢ.
Third, I've never heard of غ being realized as ɣ, but maybe that's just me. - Mustafaa 21:03, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I believe they are uvular -- 89.138.16.74 ( talk) 01:30, 8 October 2008 (UTC)
I propose resorting the letters table to reflect the Abgadi order rather than the current Hega'i. This will help those who want to compare Arabic letters to their countrparts in other alphabets. Addtionally, the image that has the letters' names and shapes depicts the hega'i order, so having the other will be a benefit, not to mention it being the original and the one used in numbering. -- Alif 16:54, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
my browser [latest ie] doesn't display a lot of symbols unless they are surrounded by {{IPA|}}, so i added that. i know it's a hack; wikipedia really needs to fix this itself. [anyone know where i can suggest this/complain?]
also, some of the IPA renderings of the letters were wrong or strange. most obviously was /x/; trying to represent a "uvular trill offglide" that may be peculiar to one particular dialect, but is certainly not representative, is strange, at best. also, ayn is glottalized only in Iraq and Kuwait.
Benwing 06:36, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
you are right, "offglide" isn't right. i did see the discussion above but i didn't look quite closely enough. however, no authorities i can find indicate that there is an accompanying trill, so i don't think this belongs unless we can show that it is *widespread* not just in one particular dialect, "prestige" or not. [the authorities disagree on whether it's velar or uvular and indicate it may vary dialectally.]
"glottalization" is not wrong as it can mean "glottal accompaniment" [see wikipedia article]. as for ayn, i've heard quite a lot of egyptian and moroccan arabic, and there is no glottal accompaniment in it. if there were, it would be obvious -- you'd hear a closure. what you're probably hearing is creaky voice. cf. Anatole V. Lyovin "An Introduction to the Languages of the World": "[ayn] is phonetically a creaky-voice, pharyngealized resonant (there does not seem to be much air friction if there is any at all) that mimics the following vowel, or if such does not exist, the preceding one". actual glottal closure occurs only in Iraqi and Kuwaiti Arabic. Benwing 21:46, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
Macrakis wrote: Use 'j' consistently for ج (g is Egyptian); final shadda on yaa (-iyyun) is usually transliterated ī Unlike what the common belief, g is NOT an exclusively Egyptian phenomena. This has been clarified elsewhere. As such, we should be able to use g and j interchangeably, and still be correct.
On the otherhand I'm not sure whether we should follow the practice of transliterating the final yaa which has shadda on it as ī, even if it is indeed common, as this leads to confusion due to omitting the marking of a grammatical feature, namely AlNisba[h]
-- Alif 11:05, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
About g: I do understand that it is not exclusively Egyptian. However, the article should be internally consistent in its usage. Otherwise, the reader may think that they're two different phonemes, or phonetic variants within a single dialect.
Transliterating -iyyun as -yy is as far as I know completely non-standard. Though -iyy and -īy might be more logical than -ī, I don't think they're standard usage. Anyway, there's no particular need in an English encyclopedia to make the Nisba nature of the suffix transparent. -- Macrakis 16:45, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
No. G and J cannot be used interchangeably. I am tired of this. You need to see Arabic how Arabs see it! Not how you would like to see it. An accent of arabic is Not Arabic. If you are transliterating an accent usage, then G may work with certain dialects, notoriously, the Egyptian. If you are transliterating text, then you use J.-- 173.32.129.241 ( talk) 16:48, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
I have a document, found on the Net, which appears to be in ISO8859-6, except that there are some "extra" letters. One, in particular, I think is supposed to represent a "g" sound (which is of course not available in the standard Arabic alphabet). Is there a standard superset of ISO8859-6, perhaps used for Farsi, that includes more letters? (specifically, the word " Grendizer" appears to be written in Arabic, and all letters appear to translate okay except for the "g")
The abjad order doesn't really "preserve" the older Phoenician/Hebrew/Aramaic alphabet order, since the Abjad order was pretty much created after the Arabic alphabet had already been expanded to 28 letters, by matching each Aramaic letter with a corresponding letter of the fully consonant-dotted Arabic alphabet (with six Arabic letters left over at the end). If the Abjad order PRESERVED the older order, then there would be no Arabic letter corresponding to the Aramaic letter semkat (samekh) in the Aramaic alphabet ordering (i.e. 15th position), since no Arabic letter is derived from Aramaic samekh. AnonMoos 01:01, 6 September 2005 (UTC) 05:01, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
I would expect a clear division between sections talking about the Arabic script itself (as it has been used on paper) and sections talking electronic-data related issues. The computer-related sections should refer back to the normal paper sections discussing corresponding computer-related issues.
I do not know what the best structure of the article would be:
I'm uncomfortable with reading Unicode codes when I'm just reading about the script. For example:
and perhaps other.
I would move this information out of the main sections.
Best regards,-- Imz 22:21, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
In the initial paragraph, I chnaged transcribe other languages to write other languages, simply because transcribe appeared to me an inappropriate special term. From Merriam-Webster:
Then, I thought perhaps there was some significance in the word. Perhaps, it was meant that the way they adopted it for other languages was similar to transcribing what they heard, not trying to respect some other sides of the other language's structure. But anyway, I'm not an expert, and that was not clear from the text. So, if someone has the required knowledge, you could write about it more somewhere in the article.-- Imz 19:14, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
the hamza rules page is left unedited. i've found this nice thread. http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=43789 someone should form it well and edit Arabic alphabet (writing of the hamza)
I don't know much about Arabic, but I feel that the 2 tables and 1 image are redundant. Both the "Primary Letters" and "Other Characters" tables are useful enough, but the image is redundant. Not knowing anything about Arabic, I didn't want to delete it unless it wasn't really useful. -- Limetom 04:50, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
I've encountered usage of "extended" letters to transliterate foreign sounds (such as p, g, v) in Arabic. Could someone clarify this issue? -- 194.226.235.251 18:30, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
This is a question for native English speakers: Does the opening sentence »The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing in the Arabic language.« make sense in English? Can an alphabet be a script, or are these two different terms? Judging on the use in my native Slovenian, I would call »a script« a set of defined symbols used to write a language, and »an alphabet« a common, or defined, order of these symbols. Consistent with this, we are talking about Latin script, but about English alphabet, and, for instance, about different positions of letters Ä and Ö in German and Swedish alphabets. Judging from the usage in Wikipedia, though, I would say that the terms »alphabet« and »alphabetic writing system« are used more loosely and perhaps interchangeably in English. Please comment on this. -- Peterlin 15:55, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
With the browser I was using (Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7) the two sets of lines demonstrating the Abjadi orders in Arabic and roman letters were misaligned, so I decided to put them in tables. It turned out Firefox was also being too clever and rendering them right to left, which put them in the wrong order. So these are now both in the right order and properly aligned.
I may have inadvertently introduced some errors into the order (I am not familiar with Arabic myself). I would appreciate it if someone who knows what they're doing would check this over.
Hairy Dude 17:48, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
Currently the section titled Numerals has the following table:
|
|
When I first read this and saw an asterisk near the ٢, I thought that meant it was part of the letter. However, in the paragraph below it has this: "*Standard form of number 2 in Egypt is slightly different". Isn't there a better way to do this?
Kirbytime
19:39, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
What is the term for the Arabic alphabet/abjad in the relevant languages? The North Indian script is called Devanāgarī, the East Asian is called Hanzi in Chinese and Kanji in Japanese and Hanja in Korean and Hán tự in Vietnamese. How do the users of this alphabet refer to it? Could someone please add that information to the article? - leigh (φθόγγος) 05:49, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
This strikes me as a bit odd:
Isn't this sort of a matter of perspective? We think of reading a number from left to right starting with the highest digit because that's our experience as English speakers and that's how our language works, but in older days they used constructions like "four-and-twenty blackbirds" (this is still used in German as vierundzwanzig) and so "42" might have been quite a natural way to write "twenty-four" in English had things happened differently.
With this in mind, we could say that Arabic numerals are read from right-to-left, by reading the ones-place first (e.g. 316 is "6 and 10 and 300"), and it's the European languages which had things backwards. I guess this only makes sense if the way numbers are spoken in Arabic sounds somewhat like "four-and-twenty", though. -- Saforrest 02:32, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
I have changed the sound of farsi yeh, form a to i (which is true for Egypt and Iran), but as Urdu is mentioned as a language using Farsi yeh as well, could someone confirm that for Urdu. Or we have to differentiate. {{U+06D6}}
Hi all -- looking for some kind soul to contribute the Arabic for Qisas Al-Anbiya at the article of the same name. If anyone here can do it that would be great. Many thanks! -- Bookgrrl 03:15, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
The Arabic alphabet isn't "the script used for writing in the Arabic language" any more than the Latin alphabet is the script used to write the Latin language. The Latin alphabet article doesn't ignore J, U, W, or even Ŋ, so why does this article not make any mention of letters like چ? -- Ptcamn 09:57, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Some people (like me) can't see some unicode symbols (sadda, sukum, harakat). Isn't a good idea to create some .png to resolve this problem? Lemke -- 201.34.159.35 00:50, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
ʼ b ǧ d h w z
-- Cbdorsett 09:32, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
I think that writing Arabic words without ligatures and joining letters will make reading Arabic text much easier. Why do not perform this reform at least in home? Example:
الله - word Allah (A LLAH) written with joining - difficult to read, appears optically as three separate symbols - A and A are separated, but L, L, and H are joined into one symbol.
ا ل ل ّ ه - word Allah (A L L A H) written without joining - easy to read, appears optically as five separate symbols - A, L, L, A and H are fully separated.
Hebrew is written with distinct letters, but why Arabic is not written that way, at least since modern times? Why Arabs never didn't performed this reform?
Why the particular phrase "in the hotel" used as the example phrase in the infobox? AnonMoos 15:51, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
I have noticed that several pages for Arabic alphabet letters, such as tāʼ, ṣād, and ṭāʼ, redirect to a page titled for the equivalent Hebrew letter. I think this might be inappropriate. What does anyone else think? 129.12.200.49 16:34, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, not quite. They redirect to pages for the common Semitic letters, and the titles of these pages are supposed to be the Phoenician names of the letters. It is true that many of these pages have more information on the Hebrew letter than on other letters; that should be corrected by adding more sections to those articles. -- Macrakis 19:26, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
I know Arabic is said to be displayed "right-to-left" though is technically bidirectional because, I think, some string are displayed LTR (ie numbers). So is a sentence displayed right to left character by character (CBA), word by word (ghi def abc) or concept by concept (ccc ddd aaa bbb). It seems like a basic question but I can't find the answer. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Gfannick ( talk • contribs) 16:33, 4 January 2007 (UTC).
It's right-to-left by character and word, except for numbers. That is, if the sentences "I am 42. He is 18." were written in "Arabic" order, it would be ".18 si eH. 42 ma I" Hope this helps! Herbivore 04:24, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
Take a look at Bi-directional text for more information on the question. Cbdorsett 08:17, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
I think it's worth noting that as we borrowed the numerals from Arabic and not the other way around, in actuality we are the ones that use bi-directional text. This is why when you justify numbers, you must do so on a right margin instead of on the left, as would be expected with the left-to-right ordering of our script:
10234 321 41
One might make an argument against this by saying that we read numbers in the order they're written, but this is hardly universally true in European languages -- German, for example, reads 27 as "7 and 20", and this was common enough in English that in older texts instances of it can still be found. Granted, no one says 7 and 20 and 100, but still, it's worth thinking about. 70.132.3.92 01:02, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
In an effort to improve this article, I'd like to suggest the following changes:
This should universalize the content sufficiently to remove the {{Globalize}} tag.
-- Cbdorsett 06:35, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Should the article be titled "Arabic alphabet"? By definition, it's not an alphabet, but an Impure Abjad. Therefore, it should be "Arabic abjad," or at least "Arabic script." Any thoughts? The ikiroid ( talk· desk· Advise me) 19:53, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
Can someone remove the "</noinclude>" wiki markup from the beginning of the article? I cannot even find the markup code in the article code. Very strange . . . can someone help please? Thanks! JeffreyN 23:39, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Hello, I was hoping to find a little information about wasla on this page, but I can't find anything about it. Would anyone be kind enough to add it? I am referring to the thing on top of the ʼalif in this character: ٱ
-- 203.122.77.204 14:08, 13 May 2007 (UTC)
I remember this article earlier mentioning that the r is generally rolled /r/, except for in religious Quranic recitation. This is clearly true from hearing Quranic recitation, but this article should mention whatever consonant(s) are used to replace /r/.
Hello,
Would you please let me know where that has been mentioned?
I am sure that the Quranic /r/ is a rolled one. I mean by "rolled" similar to the [
spanish R] or [
Italian R], it's an
Alveolar trill
consonant, not like the American /r/.
Please play the sound sample on the right hand section of this page
Alveolar trill.
Opensourceit
19:19, 7 July 2007 (UTC)
Arabic alphabet |
---|
Arabic script |
this chart is missing a letter, the seen. even when I scroll down and specifically click on the seen it still takes me to the page about the sheen! I need to refer to the seen in another article and I cant find the page. I don't mind refering to something else but I specifically need to refer to the seen distinguishing it from the sheen and the saad, so this page only makes the reader more confused. -- Maha Odeh 11:50, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
you can thank Epson291 ( talk · contribs) -- he successfully crippled the template in April. I've reverted to the previous version (you can do this too, it's a wiki!) dab (𒁳) 08:37, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
The article says,
I don't believe that this is correct. I am pretty sure that, in fact, this particular glyph is actually supposed to be the whole of "Allah", not just "llāh"; all the Windows Arabic fonts are simply done incorrectly. -- 129.78.64.106 02:04, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
In Arabic orthography, the Al of Allah is (unetymologically) not treated as an article. This means that the alif is not written unless pronounced. Now the alif is only a prosthetic vowel, the word is phonologically just /l:a:h/. The alif is only added when nothing else precedes. Now this would not need to be Unicode's problem. They could just have not offered an "Allah" glyph. But since they decided they did want to offer one, it's a pity they got it wrong. Conscientious font designers will just design a ligature for lam+lam+shadda+superscript_alif+ha للّٰه (while FDF2 is properly أللّٰه), and this would solve the problem if common word processors were able to deal with ligatures. Microsoft Word still (!!) cannot cope with ligatures, but it is to be hoped this will change in a year or so. Once this happens, font designers' dependence on what the UC did or did not choose to encode will finally be over. dab (𒁳) 14:40, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
[6] says: The Unicode-conformant fonts, on the other hand, are: SIL's Scheherazade, Adobe Arabic (distributed with the [7] Middle-Eastern version of the latest Adobe Reader 7), Arial Unicode MS, and Arabic Typesetting (distributed with VOLT and with Microsoft Office Proofing Tools 2003).
I tried searching the Qur'an and did not get "llah" without alif - maybe you can find something I am doing wrong: [8] [9]
But my main point was about current usage. Character coding of the Qur'an is not popular anyway - Qur'an notes It is extremely difficult to render the full Qur'ān, with all the points, in computer code, such as Unicode. -- JWB 11:20, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
let's see what we can collect on these "word ligatures" at U+FDFx:
FDF5 is the صلعم "peace be upon him" interjection. FDF7, FDF8, FDF9 are required to typeset صلى الله عليه وسلم and FDFA appears to repeat the entire phrase. FDFB jalla jalaluhu جل جلاله appears to be a pious exclamation "majestic be his splendour" or something. I would really be interested in what "legacy encoding" we are looking at here. I doubt there is one. This is Unicode 1.1, when the UC was still enthusiastic about encoding ligatures. Now they decided to stop adding ligatures, and we are stuck with the useless "allah" ligature. The sensible course for the UC would be to deprecate FDF2 (since prescribed and actual usage have diverged beyond reparation), and introduce an actual "llah" ligature e.g. at FDFE. dab (𒁳) 08:10, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
The question at this point is, is there any notable font that does comply and presents an "isolated Allah" glyph? I do not seem to have such a font. dab (𒁳) 15:07, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL
I get 119,000 google hits for the character. That's not very much compared to the 180M for الله. There seem to be almost no pages in Arabic. There seems to be a fair number of Turkish pages, but in most cases, the character is apparently just used for decoration (myspace.com etc.)
dab (𒁳) 11:07, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
From my childhood I remember a comment about one letter "this letter is for the sound made by giaurs when they drink too much wine" (or something like that). What letter it may be and who is the author of this witticism? Is this remark famous enough to be included in the article about the letter? I would guess it is about Ayin. Any comments? `' Míkka 23:04, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
Why is Zāīn given as "Zāī" in the table? Badagnani 05:35, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
In which nations are you speaking of? Our own article gives the Arabic name of this letter as "zain" or "zayin." Badagnani 00:10, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
What is the consensus on this undiscussed blanking? Are these extra letters never used to write the Arabic language, even when writing Persian names or phrases? 24.93.190.134 01:02, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps I should have added my reasoning here, sorry. My main reasons for removing them from that table were 1) as far as I know, they don't fall into the sequence of primary letters as given in the table, and 2) their presentation did not match the rest of the table (the name and translit. columns were empty and the phonemic values were not correctly given). Perhaps the 'keheh' could be added to the modified letters table below. 'Tcheh' could also be added there, but may require more discussion since it apparently represents different sounds in different places ( Talk:Arabic_alphabet#Persian_Alphabet_.2B_Gim). StephenHudson 16:59, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
I asked "Are these extra letters never used to write the Arabic language, even when writing Persian names or phrases?" You didn't answer that. We must exercise due deliberation (and discussion) here. You didn't. Please fix this situation. Badagnani 17:02, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Why is the letter hamza missing from the listing of letters in the Arabic alphabet on this page? In all Arabic academic works it is considered a full letter not a diacritic or anything else. The only dispute is pretty much whether in some given Arabic dictionary they decide to place hamza at the beginning or end of the alphabet! Also could someone explain all this abjad abujadiyyah craziness? Its not clear from the respective pages what on earth people meant seeing as in Arabic 'abjad' just means alphabet. An alif may be vowel or seat for hamza, a yaa' a consonant or a vowel, etc with waaw. At least to a speaker of Arabic, 'abjad' has no distinctive nature w.r.t. 'alphabet', are people just being pretentious? Brought to you by the Save the Hamza Campaign, and Bored Arabic Students United 135.196.27.80 22:58, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
Should mention in that section that the Ottoman Empire had a specific policy of forbidding printing on its territory of works using the Arabic alphabet, or aimed at Muslims, until the 18th-century. AnonMoos ( talk) 06:06, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
In most of the article, the figure given is 28, but one place says 29. I guess the bone of contention is the Hamza. Is the hamza considered a primary letter of the Arabic alphabet, or not? FilipeS ( talk) 18:03, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
Information about the pronunciation of ص should be added at Tsade. Badagnani ( talk) 21:22, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
Information about the pronunciation of ط should be added at Teth.
Arabic Wordlist ordered by frequency (in Arabic Wikipedia) [10] -- 212.186.64.225 ( talk) 09:49, 5 June 2008 (UTC)
Why is gaf ( گ), which is used in Moroccan Arabic, not mentioned in this article? Badagnani ( talk) 04:42, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
Also ﯓ. Badagnani ( talk) 08:05, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
This article isn't about the Arabic language but the Arabic alphabet. Users will come here looking for the standard letters, as well as the modified letters, which are certainly encountered in Arabic writings, whether in transliteration, Maghrebi names, etc. However, the latter can't be found anywhere else at Wikipedia because there is no other article collecting them. In order to have the best reference possible, we need to collect them. Badagnani ( talk) 05:56, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
Some are used in Persian, some are used in transliterating words from English and other languages, some are used for various Pakistani and South Asian langauges, some are used for West African languages, and some are used for non-Semitic Maghrebi languages. Badagnani ( talk) 07:48, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
Additional modified letters used in the Arabic alphabet for other languages and transliterating foreign words have been added. Can someone put them into the grid so that we have a complete listing, properly formatted? Most of the letters have their own Wikipedia articles. Many thanks for this. Badagnani ( talk) 20:52, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
They are, in fact, listed at List of Latin letters. Badagnani ( talk) 21:32, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
It's a start. Our project is characterized by constant improvement. My HTML skills aren't such to allow for me to create such a grid. However, now all the letters are there and ready to be explained for our readers, so we have a complete, thorough article and don't fail to discuss any of them. Badagnani ( talk) 17:15, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
Many of the characters I added already have their own Wikipedia articles, which are in the category "Arabic letters," much like some Latin letters are not used in the Latin or English languages. Of these, three are used in the Arabic language for transliteration of foreign wards, particularly in the Levant. The characters, as modifications of Arabic letters used in the Arabic script both in the Arabic language as well as applied to other languages, should be presented to our readers, in an easily findable and central place, wherever that may be (even if it means splitting them out, except for the three letters used in Arabic transliteration, into their own article, like the Latin characters article mentioned above). Badagnani ( talk) 03:13, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
That's very possible, if we can get someone who can do a box showing all the forms of each letter. I presume we would keep the three letters sometimes used in Arabic for transliterating V, P, and CH? Badagnani ( talk) 06:25, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
I removed the sentence that someone else had tagged for a citation earlier today, claiming that support for the abjadi collation order isn't found in major software. I went found [11] and found that while this is true for most of the specific software I looked into that have any Arabic collation at all (Windows XP, SQL Server, MySQL), it isn't true for Oracle, which provides both collation options. — Largo Plazo ( talk) 16:07, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
I printed out the table of letters for future reference, and then I realized that many of medial and final forms are showing incorrectly! Letters like dal, ra, zay, sin, and others don't have the little tail connecting them to the previous letter in the medial (if it exists) and final forms. E.g.
General Unicode |
Contextual forms | Name | Translit. | Phonemic Value ( IPA) | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial | ||||
062F د |
FEA9 ﺩ |
FEAA ﺪ |
— | dāl | d | /d/ |
YMMV, but for me, the dal in the 'final' column there has a hook to the left but no connector to the right.
I investigated further (using Character Map) and found that this is because major fonts on my Windows XP machine have the wrong glyph for certain Unicode points, e.g. U+FEAA "Arabic letter dal final form"! For example, New York Times has it wrong (without connector), but Arial Unicode MS has it right (with connector). I checked on another Windows XP machine, and in both Firefox 3.0 and IE 7. Same behavior. Bummer! This means that probably a lot of users, in fact probably most users, who visit the Arabic page, are seeing the wrong medial/final forms for many letters. Bummer! (What glyphs do you see? What type of machine are you on?)
Well, I wouldn't put the onus on Wikipedia to make up for apparent mistakes in these Windows fonts; but I noticed that this problem doesn't occur in certain other articles. For example, the article for Dāl shows the final shape just fine:
Position in word | Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial |
---|---|---|---|---|
Glyph form: ( Help) |
د | ـد | ـد | د |
It does this by using the template [ Arabic alphabet shapes].
Question: should the Arabic Alphabet article be using a similar template, which seems to succeed in not showing wrong glyphs?
Secondary question: notice that the template (and therefore the Dal article) has a different convention for order of contextual forms: initial, medial, final, compared to the order in this article (which is the reverse). One can argue about which order is more intuitive, but it would be nice to have them consistent, so you don't always have to be checking column headers.
In the Primary Letters table (see below), the two columns General Unicode and Contexual Isolated Forms have letters that are identical apart from the number below them. I suggest we merge the 2 columns together and have the both numbers listed below each letter. Arjun G. Menon ( talk · mail) 10:45, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
General Unicode |
Contextual forms | Name | Translit. | Phonemic Value ( IPA) | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial | ||||
0627 ا |
FE8D ﺍ |
FE8E ﺎ |
— | ʾalif | ʾ / ā | various, including /aː/ | |
0628 ب |
FE8F ﺏ |
FE90 ﺐ |
FE92 ﺒ |
FE91 ﺑ |
bāʾ | b | /b/ |
062A ت |
FE95 ﺕ |
FE96 ﺖ |
FE98 ﺘ |
FE97 ﺗ |
tāʾ | t | /t/ |
062B ث |
FE99 ﺙ |
FE9A ﺚ |
FE9C ﺜ |
FE9B ﺛ |
ṯāʾ | ṯ | /θ/ |
062C ج |
FE9D ﺝ |
FE9E ﺞ |
FEA0 ﺠ |
FE9F ﺟ |
ǧīm | ǧ (also j, g) | [ʤ] / [ʒ] / [ɡ] |
062D ح |
FEA1 ﺡ |
FEA2 ﺢ |
FEA4 ﺤ |
FEA3 ﺣ |
ḥāʾ | ḥ | /ħ/ |
062E خ |
FEA5 ﺥ |
FEA6 ﺦ |
FEA8 ﺨ |
FEA7 ﺧ |
ḫāʾ | ḫ (also kh, x) | /x/ |
062F د |
FEA9 ﺩ |
FEAA ﺪ |
— | dāl | d | /d/ | |
0630 ذ |
FEAB ﺫ |
FEAC ﺬ |
— | ḏāl | ḏ (also dh, ð) | /ð/ | |
0631 ر |
FEAD ﺭ |
FEAE ﺮ |
— | rāʾ | r | /r/ | |
0632 ز |
FEAF ﺯ |
FEB0 ﺰ |
— | zāī | z | /z/ | |
0633 س |
FEB1 ﺱ |
FEB2 ﺲ |
FEB4 ﺴ |
FEB3 ﺳ |
sīn | s | /s/ |
0634 ش |
FEB5 ﺵ |
FEB6 ﺶ |
FEB8 ﺸ |
FEB7 ﺷ |
šīn | š (also sh) | /ʃ/ |
0635 ص |
FEB9 ﺹ |
FEBA ﺺ |
FEBC ﺼ |
FEBB ﺻ |
ṣād | ṣ | /sˁ/ |
0636 ض |
FEBD ﺽ |
FEBE ﺾ |
FEC0 ﻀ |
FEBF ﺿ |
ḍād | ḍ | /dˁ/ |
0637 ط |
FEC1 ﻁ |
FEC2 ﻂ |
FEC4 ﻄ |
FEC3 ﻃ |
ṭāʾ | ṭ | /tˁ/ |
0638 ظ |
FEC5 ﻅ |
FEC6 ﻆ |
FEC8 ﻈ |
FEC7 ﻇ |
ẓāʾ | ẓ | /ðˁ/ / /zˁ/ |
0639 ع |
FEC9 ﻉ |
FECA ﻊ |
FECC ﻌ |
FECB ﻋ |
ʿayn | ʿ | /ʕ/ |
063A غ |
FECD ﻍ |
FECE ﻎ |
FED0 ﻐ |
FECF ﻏ |
ġayn | ġ (also gh) | /ɣ/ (/g/ in many loanwords) |
0641 ف |
FED1 ﻑ |
FED2 ﻒ |
FED4 ﻔ |
FED3 ﻓ |
fāʾ | f | /f/ |
0642 ق |
FED5 ﻕ |
FED6 ﻖ |
FED8 ﻘ |
FED7 ﻗ |
qāf | q | /q/ |
0643 ك |
FED9 ﻙ |
FEDA ﻚ |
FEDC ﻜ |
FEDB ﻛ |
kāf | k | /k/ |
0644 ل |
FEDD ﻝ |
FEDE ﻞ |
FEE0 ﻠ |
FEDF ﻟ |
lām | l | /l/, ([lˁ] in Allah only) |
0645 م |
FEE1 ﻡ |
FEE2 ﻢ |
FEE4 ﻤ |
FEE3 ﻣ |
mīm | m | /m/ |
0646 ن |
FEE5 ﻥ |
FEE6 ﻦ |
FEE8 ﻨ |
FEE7 ﻧ |
nūn | n | /n/ |
0647 ه |
FEE9 ﻩ |
FEEA ﻪ |
FEEC ﻬ |
FEEB ﻫ |
hāʾ | h | /h/ |
0648 و |
FEED ﻭ |
FEEE ﻮ |
— | wāw | w / ū | /w/ / /uː/ | |
064A ي |
FEF1 ﻱ |
FEF2 ﻲ |
FEF4 ﻴ |
FEF3 ﻳ |
yāʾ | y / ī | /j/ / /iː/ |
I've tried to make these two sections more user-friendly, as I think the normal person coming to this article will be a beginner-learner of Arabic. PiCo ( talk) 05:06, 25 June 2009 (UTC)
I would like to propose a link to a free course of the Arabic Alphabet:
The course is not made by me (albeit it is hosted on my website). I think it genuinely is a useful resource. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lyzazel ( talk • contribs) 16:50, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
Where the names of the letters are wikilinked, the underlining means that underbars to the letters disappear (and underdots etc become very indistinct); "tāʾ" and "ṯāʾ" are seen to be different - tāʾ and ṯāʾ render identically (in my browser, anyway). Not sure what a solution is - possibly something like ṯāʾ ( article), although that's very messy. Pseudomonas( talk) 09:34, 19 October 2009 (UTC)
Since the Arabic writing system is technically not an alphabet (it is an abjad), wouldn't it be more appropriate to move this article to Arabic script? GSMR ( talk) 18:19, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
The parent is Egyptian hieroglyphs>>Proto-Sinaitic in parent and systems form like all letter systems on wikipedia, so that, it should be like this:
Parent : Egyptian hieroglyphs systems: Proto-Sinaitic
Proto-Canaanite alphabet Phoenician alphabet Aramaic alphabet Nabataean Arabic abjad
Thank you very much,
According to the language map ("Worldwide use of the Arabic alphabet"), Pakistan is a country "where the Arabic script is the only official orthography". However, English is an official language of Pakistan, so doesn't that mean that the Latin alphabet must also have official status? 86.161.43.54 ( talk) 14:36, 22 March 2010 (UTC).
This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
For users needing assistance with Arabic script, please add requests at Wikipedia:WikiProject Arab world/Requests for Arabic script.
Talk:Arabic alphabet/from the French Wikipedia - temp page moved into talk namespace, as per policy.
Currently the page says jeem can be pronounced either as ʒ or dʒ. However, shouldn't the dʒ be linking to Voiced palato-alveolar affricate instead of referring to d and ʒ separately? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.93.53.136 ( talk) 23:17, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
I interpret the second key on map to indicates countries where arabic script and adapted script, may be used (even if not official - eg- India and China are shown light green on map). The accompanying paragraph to map refers to Indonesia and Malaysia, but both omitted as light green on map. Article on Jawi script also says South Philippines, Sth Thailand, Brunei & Singapore may use this script. Jawi is official script in Brunei. ````
In experimenting with the localization features of Windows XP, I see that there isn't a single "Arabic keyboard". For example, the "Arabic - Iraq" keyboard has ذ ّ in the key to the left of the Qwerty '1'/'!', while "Arabic - Saudi Arabia" has < >. There are other more important changes between those two such as the location of vowel marks (I don't know the right terminology) in the position of the uppercase Qwerty keys X C V.
I haven't experimented with the other keyboard layouts beside Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to see how many other national variants exist.
I'm not at all sure how to reflect that in the article. I made a small note in the article, but it deserves to be explained in more detail.
Bill Smith 18:30, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
This is a terrible article on what is arguably a very important subject. Its structure and language are both dense and pedantic, and concepts that require special clarification are inadequately developed. Too many subjects are discussed in tandem - there should be a much clearer demarcation of each example. As well, the arabic glyphs are currently in a format much too small to be comprehended. It is at present nearly opaque to the linguistic non-specialist, which is hardly appropriate for Wikipedia.
Can anyone contribute to a list of languages commonly written in Arabic alphabet? I know Urdu is, and of course Arabic. I think the entry should also include a note that the Qur'an is written in the Arabic alphabet.
::: I should say that arabic is not restricted to the three vowels ( A,o,I) as many people would think, there are (Tashkeel) which is a vital element in the language (Dhamma, fat'haa, Kasrah), basically, arabic is easily adapted to any other language, especially, that there are new (not commonly used) letters, for instance, P can be written in arabic like the second letter in the arabic alphabet (Baa') except with three dots beneath instead of one. I disagree with the statement, that arabic is a difficult language, and isn't flexible. Once you cross the pronounciation barrier, then it is matter of some vocabulary and grammar, and you can speak the language fluently, it is just like any other language really, but to completely master the language,it'll require a lifetime, but we don't need to master a language in order to speak it, do we ??
I think the table of Unicode codes should go elsewhere, something like "Unicode codes from the Arabic alphabet". It clutters the article, not everyone will be interested in this technical matter.
I may do the move in a few days if no one protests.
FvdP 20:56 Oct 11, 2002 (UTC)
Seconded. I have limited internet access, though, and cannot keep a computer for long enough to do such a thing. Scott Paeth 05:27, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
I have started a merge of the Arabic examples from the German Wikipedia Karada
From the German version (crudely translated):
Is this correct? Karada
You need to do the HTML Unicode in decimal, not hexadecimal. Using hexadecimal reduces even further the number of browsers on which it will work. -- Zundark 21:17 Jan 5, 2003 (UTC)
The French Wikipedia article really is much better than this one. Does anyone want to start the process of translating the French article to English? -- The Anome 10:52, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)
See
Arabic alphabet/from the French Wikipedia for a start on this translation process. Anyone want to translate a paragraph? --
The Anome 13:32, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Can anyone tell me how to write articles using Arabic script? I have absolutely no idea on how to do it! ThaGrind 02:48, 21 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Took the liberty to change ta to dal د in the vowels section for clarity. There was no reason to use ta, write it incorrectly and mislead the surfers. Jeru 17:18, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)
---
There's a good list of languages using the Arabic script in the Arabic language article, for some reason. I'll see if I can find them a place here. - Mustafaa 18:00, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)
When the moors ruled Spain they ruled Spain and Portugal and there was no spanish language. People spoke Latin in several variations, possibly dialectal, all called "Vulgar Latin". The emergence and separation of the national languages in the Iberian Peninsula happened for the most part in the last 1000 years. -- 213.22.166.118 03:13, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
And the end of Moorish rule happened 500 years ago... - Mustafaa 09:37, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Well, Mozarabic language was certainly used - but are you sure Spanish wasn't used as well towards the end? For instance, Arabic-Islamic.org describes Aljamiado as "lengua castellana escrita con grafía árabe" (in 1462, that is). - Mustafaa 01:39, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I've changed the entry to reflect this discussion. Let me know what you think. Were there any Portuguese aljamiado manuscripts? - Mustafaa 23:46, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Thanks! What was Safi? By the way, you know anyone can edit here - why not get a user account and start writing some articles yourself? You certainly seem knowledgeable on the subject, and it sounds interesting... - Mustafaa 08:05, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)
--- Persian, Dari, Farsi are all the names for one language i.e. Persian language. In the list these terms were used superfulously, so I edited it. -- Mani1 16:14, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Persian and Farsi may mean the same thing, but Dari is NOT the same language as Farsi.
Aljamía was and still is in essence, the language of the Moorish descendants of Al Andalus, and thus it remains our language, the language of the Muslim mudejáres and moriscos!
(Al Fatiha)
(Çora l'alfátaha)-in aljamía
Nel nomme d'Allah, l'Arrahimo, l'Arrahimano.
1. Alhamdanzas ad Allah, arrabí dellos aílemos.
2. L'Arrahimo, l'Arrahimano.
3. Malico d'Alyamidino.
4. A bós t'albudamos, ed a bós anestainamos.
5. Alhedenáde-mos por l'alçerado almostaquino.
6. L'alçerado d'ellos que hádes almetado.
7. Non allos que amerraban. Ed allos albideros.
Xucrá, Ah'med Birzali!
hi can you show me the arabic alphebet then can you translate it for me? I have this really big project due on ancient islam tomorrow. this would really make my night a lot less hard than it already is. thank you alyssa
As a person who knows aboslutely nothing about Arabic, I find the 'Primary Letters' table to be quite useless. The text is too small to discern the characters, even when I view text in the largest size. Can something be done about this? RealGrouchy 17:13, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)
For those 8 letters marked with no [Medial] or [Initial]: while they don't have a [Medial] form, they do have an [Initial] form which is the same as the [Isolated] form. Should we change the various tables to reflect that? Wael Ellithy ( talk) 10:49, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
Unlike some of the commenters above, I can see all Arabic letters in the text correctly (maybe because I'm using Mozilla SeaMonkey on Linux, and have installed a number of additional fonts, including some for Arabic, and maybe also because my favourite Wikipedia skin is Cologne Blue, which uses larger text than the default Monobook). All the shapes in the table are correct (except of course insofar as isolated and final shapes of non-joining letters are also listed respectively as "initial" and "medial"), however some of the letters are listed with identical Unicode codepoints numbers (for contextual shapes relating to different letters), which cannot be correct. I don't have the time to correct that section now, but the reference PDF pages are http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0600.pdf for common codepoints and http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFE70.pdf for "Presentation forms B" (i.e., distinct codepoints for the various contextual shapes). — Tonymec ( talk) 06:42, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
The Romanization I see most often in Internet use, uses digits in addition to letters, for example 3 for `ayn and 7 for Haa', based on visual similarity of the characters. I'd like information on it. Wikipedia has information on similar ASCII keyboard-friendly Internet transliterations for other non-Roman alphabets, for example Greeklish and Volapuk_encoding.
Since the digit representations are widely used and standardized, they should go back in the table or text. The table currently has as many as 4 transliterations per Arabic letter, some of which are used much less frequently than the digits. Also, the digits are used online where it is not obvious how to find a guide to their meaning, unlike printed academic works which usually include notes about the transliteration they use, if there is any doubt that readers will understand. -- JWB 21:13, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The table also doesn't identify which transliterations of a letter are used by which transliteration system. DIN-31635 and SATTS are also stubs with no info. So effectively there is no info on transliteration systems at all, just a listing of the union of several systems, with emphasis on less used ones. -- JWB 23:32, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
We all thank you for your new-found enthusiasm for the language, but please, please, please be sure of what you write, before you change something.
Someone just removed the dagger alif from 'allah' and replaced it with a fatha. A first-year student, perhaps, who has just learned about the diacritics for the short vowels?
If I get some time, I'll try to clarify the section about the diacritics - the 'harakat' - but in the meantime, PLEASE do not 'fix' anything on your own unless you KNOW you are right.
Thanks. Cbdorsett 15:31, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
The above is complete bullshit. "Alif maqsura" is a grammatical concept in the Arabic language; it is not a letter form. It can be represented by either a dotless ya (ى) or an alif. Furthermore, the dotless ya does not always mean "alif maqsura". The dotless ya is used in Arabic in all four forms. The problem, which can be traced to the stupidity of Unicode, is that a) "character" is not so obvious; and b) letterform shape is distinct from context. E.g. a so-called "initial form" can be used in the middle of a word: قائل for example.
[Well I can't say anything about where if came from or what it meant originally, but I can tell you that the alif letterform serves numerous functions *in the Arabic* writing system; other systems that use Arabic letterforms may do things differently. More to the point, it is *not* a consonant in modern Arabic (or in any Arabic so far as I can tell). Why not ask the locals? They will tell you that, where alif seems to indicate a long vowel, in fact it indicates the doubling of a short vowel, which is not quite the same thing. In other words, alif has *no primary phonological value* whatsoever, ever.]
I just went around lk-ing "vowel point", and in i think one case, "vowel mark" to Niqqud.
In this article the section "Ligatures" says
I made no lk to the Hebrew word
Niqqud, but is there an equivalent lk available or needed? Should this instance of "vowel mark" lk to
Abjad?
--
Jerzy
(t) 20:55, 2005 Mar 24 (UTC)
In the section "Vowels" is the following paragraph:
"Note that when the acute-shaped fatḥa which denotes a short a is added on top of a geminated consonnant (i.e. after a šadda), the fatha accent takes a vertical shape to make the composition more distinctable from the tanwiin vowel sign fatḥatan (which marks a /-an/ ending with indeterminate nunation in fully vocalized texts, see below). For an example, see the encoded ligature for ʻAllah above."
Which is unfortunately, incorrect. A šadda may be accompanied by fatḥa, damma or kasra(written below the šadda or below the letter) of which all may be single or tanwiin(nunated). A single fatḥa above a šadda is not written in a vertical shape. This "vertical shape" is the alif ḫanjariyyah or "dagger alif" which indicates an unwritten alif, as found in allāh or ar-raḥmān where the alif in both of these words is denoted with a ḫanjar rather than a full alif character).
86.136.191.158
21:36, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
Can anyone tell me what the following Arabic phrase would be written in Latin is? The phrase in question is, ما الخليفة أين?
Thanks for the help, I really appreciate it. Kaiser Matias 02:02 Apr 5 2005 (UTC)
Reading the passage about sukun I encountered the use of o in the examples. I have seen this letter also in other transliterations, the majority of transliteration tables do not mention it however, telling about just three vowels - a,i and u. Could this be briefly clarified here too? 80.235.60.55 21:55, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
O is sometimes used in transliterations for damma instead of u: Mohammad, Muhammad. U follows academic transliteration styles (Encyclopedia of Islam, MELA, etc.), o follows how it sounds in some vernaculars.
Just made a couple edits (cells misaligned, non-IPA diacritics in the IPA column, etc.). Also a couple alternate transcriptions. Since the under-dot diacritic doesn't work for all browsers, I added the unicode letters with the under-dot as a second variant. Some people have complained about one and some about the other in the comments above, so hopefully by offering both, at least one version will work for everybody. kwami 21:21, 2005 May 24 (UTC)
I think that the Persian Alphabet article should not be redirected here, and requireds a dedicated article, since the Persian alphabet has additional letters and different sounds. Likewise, there should be a note in the article indicating that Geem is the Egyptian pronounciation for Jeem, as it is known in the rest of the Arab world, and in Fusha and Classical Arabic. DigiBullet 19:14, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
First of all, is خ really a fricative-trill combination? I thought it was a pure uvular fricative.
Second, ɢ for ق is simply not within the recorded variability of MSA; in modern Arabic, it's q or g, though in Sibawayh's time it may have been ɢ.
Third, I've never heard of غ being realized as ɣ, but maybe that's just me. - Mustafaa 21:03, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I believe they are uvular -- 89.138.16.74 ( talk) 01:30, 8 October 2008 (UTC)
I propose resorting the letters table to reflect the Abgadi order rather than the current Hega'i. This will help those who want to compare Arabic letters to their countrparts in other alphabets. Addtionally, the image that has the letters' names and shapes depicts the hega'i order, so having the other will be a benefit, not to mention it being the original and the one used in numbering. -- Alif 16:54, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
my browser [latest ie] doesn't display a lot of symbols unless they are surrounded by {{IPA|}}, so i added that. i know it's a hack; wikipedia really needs to fix this itself. [anyone know where i can suggest this/complain?]
also, some of the IPA renderings of the letters were wrong or strange. most obviously was /x/; trying to represent a "uvular trill offglide" that may be peculiar to one particular dialect, but is certainly not representative, is strange, at best. also, ayn is glottalized only in Iraq and Kuwait.
Benwing 06:36, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
you are right, "offglide" isn't right. i did see the discussion above but i didn't look quite closely enough. however, no authorities i can find indicate that there is an accompanying trill, so i don't think this belongs unless we can show that it is *widespread* not just in one particular dialect, "prestige" or not. [the authorities disagree on whether it's velar or uvular and indicate it may vary dialectally.]
"glottalization" is not wrong as it can mean "glottal accompaniment" [see wikipedia article]. as for ayn, i've heard quite a lot of egyptian and moroccan arabic, and there is no glottal accompaniment in it. if there were, it would be obvious -- you'd hear a closure. what you're probably hearing is creaky voice. cf. Anatole V. Lyovin "An Introduction to the Languages of the World": "[ayn] is phonetically a creaky-voice, pharyngealized resonant (there does not seem to be much air friction if there is any at all) that mimics the following vowel, or if such does not exist, the preceding one". actual glottal closure occurs only in Iraqi and Kuwaiti Arabic. Benwing 21:46, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
Macrakis wrote: Use 'j' consistently for ج (g is Egyptian); final shadda on yaa (-iyyun) is usually transliterated ī Unlike what the common belief, g is NOT an exclusively Egyptian phenomena. This has been clarified elsewhere. As such, we should be able to use g and j interchangeably, and still be correct.
On the otherhand I'm not sure whether we should follow the practice of transliterating the final yaa which has shadda on it as ī, even if it is indeed common, as this leads to confusion due to omitting the marking of a grammatical feature, namely AlNisba[h]
-- Alif 11:05, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
About g: I do understand that it is not exclusively Egyptian. However, the article should be internally consistent in its usage. Otherwise, the reader may think that they're two different phonemes, or phonetic variants within a single dialect.
Transliterating -iyyun as -yy is as far as I know completely non-standard. Though -iyy and -īy might be more logical than -ī, I don't think they're standard usage. Anyway, there's no particular need in an English encyclopedia to make the Nisba nature of the suffix transparent. -- Macrakis 16:45, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
No. G and J cannot be used interchangeably. I am tired of this. You need to see Arabic how Arabs see it! Not how you would like to see it. An accent of arabic is Not Arabic. If you are transliterating an accent usage, then G may work with certain dialects, notoriously, the Egyptian. If you are transliterating text, then you use J.-- 173.32.129.241 ( talk) 16:48, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
I have a document, found on the Net, which appears to be in ISO8859-6, except that there are some "extra" letters. One, in particular, I think is supposed to represent a "g" sound (which is of course not available in the standard Arabic alphabet). Is there a standard superset of ISO8859-6, perhaps used for Farsi, that includes more letters? (specifically, the word " Grendizer" appears to be written in Arabic, and all letters appear to translate okay except for the "g")
The abjad order doesn't really "preserve" the older Phoenician/Hebrew/Aramaic alphabet order, since the Abjad order was pretty much created after the Arabic alphabet had already been expanded to 28 letters, by matching each Aramaic letter with a corresponding letter of the fully consonant-dotted Arabic alphabet (with six Arabic letters left over at the end). If the Abjad order PRESERVED the older order, then there would be no Arabic letter corresponding to the Aramaic letter semkat (samekh) in the Aramaic alphabet ordering (i.e. 15th position), since no Arabic letter is derived from Aramaic samekh. AnonMoos 01:01, 6 September 2005 (UTC) 05:01, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
I would expect a clear division between sections talking about the Arabic script itself (as it has been used on paper) and sections talking electronic-data related issues. The computer-related sections should refer back to the normal paper sections discussing corresponding computer-related issues.
I do not know what the best structure of the article would be:
I'm uncomfortable with reading Unicode codes when I'm just reading about the script. For example:
and perhaps other.
I would move this information out of the main sections.
Best regards,-- Imz 22:21, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
In the initial paragraph, I chnaged transcribe other languages to write other languages, simply because transcribe appeared to me an inappropriate special term. From Merriam-Webster:
Then, I thought perhaps there was some significance in the word. Perhaps, it was meant that the way they adopted it for other languages was similar to transcribing what they heard, not trying to respect some other sides of the other language's structure. But anyway, I'm not an expert, and that was not clear from the text. So, if someone has the required knowledge, you could write about it more somewhere in the article.-- Imz 19:14, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
the hamza rules page is left unedited. i've found this nice thread. http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=43789 someone should form it well and edit Arabic alphabet (writing of the hamza)
I don't know much about Arabic, but I feel that the 2 tables and 1 image are redundant. Both the "Primary Letters" and "Other Characters" tables are useful enough, but the image is redundant. Not knowing anything about Arabic, I didn't want to delete it unless it wasn't really useful. -- Limetom 04:50, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
I've encountered usage of "extended" letters to transliterate foreign sounds (such as p, g, v) in Arabic. Could someone clarify this issue? -- 194.226.235.251 18:30, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
This is a question for native English speakers: Does the opening sentence »The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing in the Arabic language.« make sense in English? Can an alphabet be a script, or are these two different terms? Judging on the use in my native Slovenian, I would call »a script« a set of defined symbols used to write a language, and »an alphabet« a common, or defined, order of these symbols. Consistent with this, we are talking about Latin script, but about English alphabet, and, for instance, about different positions of letters Ä and Ö in German and Swedish alphabets. Judging from the usage in Wikipedia, though, I would say that the terms »alphabet« and »alphabetic writing system« are used more loosely and perhaps interchangeably in English. Please comment on this. -- Peterlin 15:55, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
With the browser I was using (Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7) the two sets of lines demonstrating the Abjadi orders in Arabic and roman letters were misaligned, so I decided to put them in tables. It turned out Firefox was also being too clever and rendering them right to left, which put them in the wrong order. So these are now both in the right order and properly aligned.
I may have inadvertently introduced some errors into the order (I am not familiar with Arabic myself). I would appreciate it if someone who knows what they're doing would check this over.
Hairy Dude 17:48, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
Currently the section titled Numerals has the following table:
|
|
When I first read this and saw an asterisk near the ٢, I thought that meant it was part of the letter. However, in the paragraph below it has this: "*Standard form of number 2 in Egypt is slightly different". Isn't there a better way to do this?
Kirbytime
19:39, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
What is the term for the Arabic alphabet/abjad in the relevant languages? The North Indian script is called Devanāgarī, the East Asian is called Hanzi in Chinese and Kanji in Japanese and Hanja in Korean and Hán tự in Vietnamese. How do the users of this alphabet refer to it? Could someone please add that information to the article? - leigh (φθόγγος) 05:49, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
This strikes me as a bit odd:
Isn't this sort of a matter of perspective? We think of reading a number from left to right starting with the highest digit because that's our experience as English speakers and that's how our language works, but in older days they used constructions like "four-and-twenty blackbirds" (this is still used in German as vierundzwanzig) and so "42" might have been quite a natural way to write "twenty-four" in English had things happened differently.
With this in mind, we could say that Arabic numerals are read from right-to-left, by reading the ones-place first (e.g. 316 is "6 and 10 and 300"), and it's the European languages which had things backwards. I guess this only makes sense if the way numbers are spoken in Arabic sounds somewhat like "four-and-twenty", though. -- Saforrest 02:32, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
I have changed the sound of farsi yeh, form a to i (which is true for Egypt and Iran), but as Urdu is mentioned as a language using Farsi yeh as well, could someone confirm that for Urdu. Or we have to differentiate. {{U+06D6}}
Hi all -- looking for some kind soul to contribute the Arabic for Qisas Al-Anbiya at the article of the same name. If anyone here can do it that would be great. Many thanks! -- Bookgrrl 03:15, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
The Arabic alphabet isn't "the script used for writing in the Arabic language" any more than the Latin alphabet is the script used to write the Latin language. The Latin alphabet article doesn't ignore J, U, W, or even Ŋ, so why does this article not make any mention of letters like چ? -- Ptcamn 09:57, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Some people (like me) can't see some unicode symbols (sadda, sukum, harakat). Isn't a good idea to create some .png to resolve this problem? Lemke -- 201.34.159.35 00:50, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
ʼ b ǧ d h w z
-- Cbdorsett 09:32, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
I think that writing Arabic words without ligatures and joining letters will make reading Arabic text much easier. Why do not perform this reform at least in home? Example:
الله - word Allah (A LLAH) written with joining - difficult to read, appears optically as three separate symbols - A and A are separated, but L, L, and H are joined into one symbol.
ا ل ل ّ ه - word Allah (A L L A H) written without joining - easy to read, appears optically as five separate symbols - A, L, L, A and H are fully separated.
Hebrew is written with distinct letters, but why Arabic is not written that way, at least since modern times? Why Arabs never didn't performed this reform?
Why the particular phrase "in the hotel" used as the example phrase in the infobox? AnonMoos 15:51, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
I have noticed that several pages for Arabic alphabet letters, such as tāʼ, ṣād, and ṭāʼ, redirect to a page titled for the equivalent Hebrew letter. I think this might be inappropriate. What does anyone else think? 129.12.200.49 16:34, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, not quite. They redirect to pages for the common Semitic letters, and the titles of these pages are supposed to be the Phoenician names of the letters. It is true that many of these pages have more information on the Hebrew letter than on other letters; that should be corrected by adding more sections to those articles. -- Macrakis 19:26, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
I know Arabic is said to be displayed "right-to-left" though is technically bidirectional because, I think, some string are displayed LTR (ie numbers). So is a sentence displayed right to left character by character (CBA), word by word (ghi def abc) or concept by concept (ccc ddd aaa bbb). It seems like a basic question but I can't find the answer. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Gfannick ( talk • contribs) 16:33, 4 January 2007 (UTC).
It's right-to-left by character and word, except for numbers. That is, if the sentences "I am 42. He is 18." were written in "Arabic" order, it would be ".18 si eH. 42 ma I" Hope this helps! Herbivore 04:24, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
Take a look at Bi-directional text for more information on the question. Cbdorsett 08:17, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
I think it's worth noting that as we borrowed the numerals from Arabic and not the other way around, in actuality we are the ones that use bi-directional text. This is why when you justify numbers, you must do so on a right margin instead of on the left, as would be expected with the left-to-right ordering of our script:
10234 321 41
One might make an argument against this by saying that we read numbers in the order they're written, but this is hardly universally true in European languages -- German, for example, reads 27 as "7 and 20", and this was common enough in English that in older texts instances of it can still be found. Granted, no one says 7 and 20 and 100, but still, it's worth thinking about. 70.132.3.92 01:02, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
In an effort to improve this article, I'd like to suggest the following changes:
This should universalize the content sufficiently to remove the {{Globalize}} tag.
-- Cbdorsett 06:35, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Should the article be titled "Arabic alphabet"? By definition, it's not an alphabet, but an Impure Abjad. Therefore, it should be "Arabic abjad," or at least "Arabic script." Any thoughts? The ikiroid ( talk· desk· Advise me) 19:53, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
Can someone remove the "</noinclude>" wiki markup from the beginning of the article? I cannot even find the markup code in the article code. Very strange . . . can someone help please? Thanks! JeffreyN 23:39, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Hello, I was hoping to find a little information about wasla on this page, but I can't find anything about it. Would anyone be kind enough to add it? I am referring to the thing on top of the ʼalif in this character: ٱ
-- 203.122.77.204 14:08, 13 May 2007 (UTC)
I remember this article earlier mentioning that the r is generally rolled /r/, except for in religious Quranic recitation. This is clearly true from hearing Quranic recitation, but this article should mention whatever consonant(s) are used to replace /r/.
Hello,
Would you please let me know where that has been mentioned?
I am sure that the Quranic /r/ is a rolled one. I mean by "rolled" similar to the [
spanish R] or [
Italian R], it's an
Alveolar trill
consonant, not like the American /r/.
Please play the sound sample on the right hand section of this page
Alveolar trill.
Opensourceit
19:19, 7 July 2007 (UTC)
Arabic alphabet |
---|
Arabic script |
this chart is missing a letter, the seen. even when I scroll down and specifically click on the seen it still takes me to the page about the sheen! I need to refer to the seen in another article and I cant find the page. I don't mind refering to something else but I specifically need to refer to the seen distinguishing it from the sheen and the saad, so this page only makes the reader more confused. -- Maha Odeh 11:50, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
you can thank Epson291 ( talk · contribs) -- he successfully crippled the template in April. I've reverted to the previous version (you can do this too, it's a wiki!) dab (𒁳) 08:37, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
The article says,
I don't believe that this is correct. I am pretty sure that, in fact, this particular glyph is actually supposed to be the whole of "Allah", not just "llāh"; all the Windows Arabic fonts are simply done incorrectly. -- 129.78.64.106 02:04, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
In Arabic orthography, the Al of Allah is (unetymologically) not treated as an article. This means that the alif is not written unless pronounced. Now the alif is only a prosthetic vowel, the word is phonologically just /l:a:h/. The alif is only added when nothing else precedes. Now this would not need to be Unicode's problem. They could just have not offered an "Allah" glyph. But since they decided they did want to offer one, it's a pity they got it wrong. Conscientious font designers will just design a ligature for lam+lam+shadda+superscript_alif+ha للّٰه (while FDF2 is properly أللّٰه), and this would solve the problem if common word processors were able to deal with ligatures. Microsoft Word still (!!) cannot cope with ligatures, but it is to be hoped this will change in a year or so. Once this happens, font designers' dependence on what the UC did or did not choose to encode will finally be over. dab (𒁳) 14:40, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
[6] says: The Unicode-conformant fonts, on the other hand, are: SIL's Scheherazade, Adobe Arabic (distributed with the [7] Middle-Eastern version of the latest Adobe Reader 7), Arial Unicode MS, and Arabic Typesetting (distributed with VOLT and with Microsoft Office Proofing Tools 2003).
I tried searching the Qur'an and did not get "llah" without alif - maybe you can find something I am doing wrong: [8] [9]
But my main point was about current usage. Character coding of the Qur'an is not popular anyway - Qur'an notes It is extremely difficult to render the full Qur'ān, with all the points, in computer code, such as Unicode. -- JWB 11:20, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
let's see what we can collect on these "word ligatures" at U+FDFx:
FDF5 is the صلعم "peace be upon him" interjection. FDF7, FDF8, FDF9 are required to typeset صلى الله عليه وسلم and FDFA appears to repeat the entire phrase. FDFB jalla jalaluhu جل جلاله appears to be a pious exclamation "majestic be his splendour" or something. I would really be interested in what "legacy encoding" we are looking at here. I doubt there is one. This is Unicode 1.1, when the UC was still enthusiastic about encoding ligatures. Now they decided to stop adding ligatures, and we are stuck with the useless "allah" ligature. The sensible course for the UC would be to deprecate FDF2 (since prescribed and actual usage have diverged beyond reparation), and introduce an actual "llah" ligature e.g. at FDFE. dab (𒁳) 08:10, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
The question at this point is, is there any notable font that does comply and presents an "isolated Allah" glyph? I do not seem to have such a font. dab (𒁳) 15:07, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL
I get 119,000 google hits for the character. That's not very much compared to the 180M for الله. There seem to be almost no pages in Arabic. There seems to be a fair number of Turkish pages, but in most cases, the character is apparently just used for decoration (myspace.com etc.)
dab (𒁳) 11:07, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
From my childhood I remember a comment about one letter "this letter is for the sound made by giaurs when they drink too much wine" (or something like that). What letter it may be and who is the author of this witticism? Is this remark famous enough to be included in the article about the letter? I would guess it is about Ayin. Any comments? `' Míkka 23:04, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
Why is Zāīn given as "Zāī" in the table? Badagnani 05:35, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
In which nations are you speaking of? Our own article gives the Arabic name of this letter as "zain" or "zayin." Badagnani 00:10, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
What is the consensus on this undiscussed blanking? Are these extra letters never used to write the Arabic language, even when writing Persian names or phrases? 24.93.190.134 01:02, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps I should have added my reasoning here, sorry. My main reasons for removing them from that table were 1) as far as I know, they don't fall into the sequence of primary letters as given in the table, and 2) their presentation did not match the rest of the table (the name and translit. columns were empty and the phonemic values were not correctly given). Perhaps the 'keheh' could be added to the modified letters table below. 'Tcheh' could also be added there, but may require more discussion since it apparently represents different sounds in different places ( Talk:Arabic_alphabet#Persian_Alphabet_.2B_Gim). StephenHudson 16:59, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
I asked "Are these extra letters never used to write the Arabic language, even when writing Persian names or phrases?" You didn't answer that. We must exercise due deliberation (and discussion) here. You didn't. Please fix this situation. Badagnani 17:02, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Why is the letter hamza missing from the listing of letters in the Arabic alphabet on this page? In all Arabic academic works it is considered a full letter not a diacritic or anything else. The only dispute is pretty much whether in some given Arabic dictionary they decide to place hamza at the beginning or end of the alphabet! Also could someone explain all this abjad abujadiyyah craziness? Its not clear from the respective pages what on earth people meant seeing as in Arabic 'abjad' just means alphabet. An alif may be vowel or seat for hamza, a yaa' a consonant or a vowel, etc with waaw. At least to a speaker of Arabic, 'abjad' has no distinctive nature w.r.t. 'alphabet', are people just being pretentious? Brought to you by the Save the Hamza Campaign, and Bored Arabic Students United 135.196.27.80 22:58, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
Should mention in that section that the Ottoman Empire had a specific policy of forbidding printing on its territory of works using the Arabic alphabet, or aimed at Muslims, until the 18th-century. AnonMoos ( talk) 06:06, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
In most of the article, the figure given is 28, but one place says 29. I guess the bone of contention is the Hamza. Is the hamza considered a primary letter of the Arabic alphabet, or not? FilipeS ( talk) 18:03, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
Information about the pronunciation of ص should be added at Tsade. Badagnani ( talk) 21:22, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
Information about the pronunciation of ط should be added at Teth.
Arabic Wordlist ordered by frequency (in Arabic Wikipedia) [10] -- 212.186.64.225 ( talk) 09:49, 5 June 2008 (UTC)
Why is gaf ( گ), which is used in Moroccan Arabic, not mentioned in this article? Badagnani ( talk) 04:42, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
Also ﯓ. Badagnani ( talk) 08:05, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
This article isn't about the Arabic language but the Arabic alphabet. Users will come here looking for the standard letters, as well as the modified letters, which are certainly encountered in Arabic writings, whether in transliteration, Maghrebi names, etc. However, the latter can't be found anywhere else at Wikipedia because there is no other article collecting them. In order to have the best reference possible, we need to collect them. Badagnani ( talk) 05:56, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
Some are used in Persian, some are used in transliterating words from English and other languages, some are used for various Pakistani and South Asian langauges, some are used for West African languages, and some are used for non-Semitic Maghrebi languages. Badagnani ( talk) 07:48, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
Additional modified letters used in the Arabic alphabet for other languages and transliterating foreign words have been added. Can someone put them into the grid so that we have a complete listing, properly formatted? Most of the letters have their own Wikipedia articles. Many thanks for this. Badagnani ( talk) 20:52, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
They are, in fact, listed at List of Latin letters. Badagnani ( talk) 21:32, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
It's a start. Our project is characterized by constant improvement. My HTML skills aren't such to allow for me to create such a grid. However, now all the letters are there and ready to be explained for our readers, so we have a complete, thorough article and don't fail to discuss any of them. Badagnani ( talk) 17:15, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
Many of the characters I added already have their own Wikipedia articles, which are in the category "Arabic letters," much like some Latin letters are not used in the Latin or English languages. Of these, three are used in the Arabic language for transliteration of foreign wards, particularly in the Levant. The characters, as modifications of Arabic letters used in the Arabic script both in the Arabic language as well as applied to other languages, should be presented to our readers, in an easily findable and central place, wherever that may be (even if it means splitting them out, except for the three letters used in Arabic transliteration, into their own article, like the Latin characters article mentioned above). Badagnani ( talk) 03:13, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
That's very possible, if we can get someone who can do a box showing all the forms of each letter. I presume we would keep the three letters sometimes used in Arabic for transliterating V, P, and CH? Badagnani ( talk) 06:25, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
I removed the sentence that someone else had tagged for a citation earlier today, claiming that support for the abjadi collation order isn't found in major software. I went found [11] and found that while this is true for most of the specific software I looked into that have any Arabic collation at all (Windows XP, SQL Server, MySQL), it isn't true for Oracle, which provides both collation options. — Largo Plazo ( talk) 16:07, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
I printed out the table of letters for future reference, and then I realized that many of medial and final forms are showing incorrectly! Letters like dal, ra, zay, sin, and others don't have the little tail connecting them to the previous letter in the medial (if it exists) and final forms. E.g.
General Unicode |
Contextual forms | Name | Translit. | Phonemic Value ( IPA) | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial | ||||
062F د |
FEA9 ﺩ |
FEAA ﺪ |
— | dāl | d | /d/ |
YMMV, but for me, the dal in the 'final' column there has a hook to the left but no connector to the right.
I investigated further (using Character Map) and found that this is because major fonts on my Windows XP machine have the wrong glyph for certain Unicode points, e.g. U+FEAA "Arabic letter dal final form"! For example, New York Times has it wrong (without connector), but Arial Unicode MS has it right (with connector). I checked on another Windows XP machine, and in both Firefox 3.0 and IE 7. Same behavior. Bummer! This means that probably a lot of users, in fact probably most users, who visit the Arabic page, are seeing the wrong medial/final forms for many letters. Bummer! (What glyphs do you see? What type of machine are you on?)
Well, I wouldn't put the onus on Wikipedia to make up for apparent mistakes in these Windows fonts; but I noticed that this problem doesn't occur in certain other articles. For example, the article for Dāl shows the final shape just fine:
Position in word | Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial |
---|---|---|---|---|
Glyph form: ( Help) |
د | ـد | ـد | د |
It does this by using the template [ Arabic alphabet shapes].
Question: should the Arabic Alphabet article be using a similar template, which seems to succeed in not showing wrong glyphs?
Secondary question: notice that the template (and therefore the Dal article) has a different convention for order of contextual forms: initial, medial, final, compared to the order in this article (which is the reverse). One can argue about which order is more intuitive, but it would be nice to have them consistent, so you don't always have to be checking column headers.
In the Primary Letters table (see below), the two columns General Unicode and Contexual Isolated Forms have letters that are identical apart from the number below them. I suggest we merge the 2 columns together and have the both numbers listed below each letter. Arjun G. Menon ( talk · mail) 10:45, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
General Unicode |
Contextual forms | Name | Translit. | Phonemic Value ( IPA) | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial | ||||
0627 ا |
FE8D ﺍ |
FE8E ﺎ |
— | ʾalif | ʾ / ā | various, including /aː/ | |
0628 ب |
FE8F ﺏ |
FE90 ﺐ |
FE92 ﺒ |
FE91 ﺑ |
bāʾ | b | /b/ |
062A ت |
FE95 ﺕ |
FE96 ﺖ |
FE98 ﺘ |
FE97 ﺗ |
tāʾ | t | /t/ |
062B ث |
FE99 ﺙ |
FE9A ﺚ |
FE9C ﺜ |
FE9B ﺛ |
ṯāʾ | ṯ | /θ/ |
062C ج |
FE9D ﺝ |
FE9E ﺞ |
FEA0 ﺠ |
FE9F ﺟ |
ǧīm | ǧ (also j, g) | [ʤ] / [ʒ] / [ɡ] |
062D ح |
FEA1 ﺡ |
FEA2 ﺢ |
FEA4 ﺤ |
FEA3 ﺣ |
ḥāʾ | ḥ | /ħ/ |
062E خ |
FEA5 ﺥ |
FEA6 ﺦ |
FEA8 ﺨ |
FEA7 ﺧ |
ḫāʾ | ḫ (also kh, x) | /x/ |
062F د |
FEA9 ﺩ |
FEAA ﺪ |
— | dāl | d | /d/ | |
0630 ذ |
FEAB ﺫ |
FEAC ﺬ |
— | ḏāl | ḏ (also dh, ð) | /ð/ | |
0631 ر |
FEAD ﺭ |
FEAE ﺮ |
— | rāʾ | r | /r/ | |
0632 ز |
FEAF ﺯ |
FEB0 ﺰ |
— | zāī | z | /z/ | |
0633 س |
FEB1 ﺱ |
FEB2 ﺲ |
FEB4 ﺴ |
FEB3 ﺳ |
sīn | s | /s/ |
0634 ش |
FEB5 ﺵ |
FEB6 ﺶ |
FEB8 ﺸ |
FEB7 ﺷ |
šīn | š (also sh) | /ʃ/ |
0635 ص |
FEB9 ﺹ |
FEBA ﺺ |
FEBC ﺼ |
FEBB ﺻ |
ṣād | ṣ | /sˁ/ |
0636 ض |
FEBD ﺽ |
FEBE ﺾ |
FEC0 ﻀ |
FEBF ﺿ |
ḍād | ḍ | /dˁ/ |
0637 ط |
FEC1 ﻁ |
FEC2 ﻂ |
FEC4 ﻄ |
FEC3 ﻃ |
ṭāʾ | ṭ | /tˁ/ |
0638 ظ |
FEC5 ﻅ |
FEC6 ﻆ |
FEC8 ﻈ |
FEC7 ﻇ |
ẓāʾ | ẓ | /ðˁ/ / /zˁ/ |
0639 ع |
FEC9 ﻉ |
FECA ﻊ |
FECC ﻌ |
FECB ﻋ |
ʿayn | ʿ | /ʕ/ |
063A غ |
FECD ﻍ |
FECE ﻎ |
FED0 ﻐ |
FECF ﻏ |
ġayn | ġ (also gh) | /ɣ/ (/g/ in many loanwords) |
0641 ف |
FED1 ﻑ |
FED2 ﻒ |
FED4 ﻔ |
FED3 ﻓ |
fāʾ | f | /f/ |
0642 ق |
FED5 ﻕ |
FED6 ﻖ |
FED8 ﻘ |
FED7 ﻗ |
qāf | q | /q/ |
0643 ك |
FED9 ﻙ |
FEDA ﻚ |
FEDC ﻜ |
FEDB ﻛ |
kāf | k | /k/ |
0644 ل |
FEDD ﻝ |
FEDE ﻞ |
FEE0 ﻠ |
FEDF ﻟ |
lām | l | /l/, ([lˁ] in Allah only) |
0645 م |
FEE1 ﻡ |
FEE2 ﻢ |
FEE4 ﻤ |
FEE3 ﻣ |
mīm | m | /m/ |
0646 ن |
FEE5 ﻥ |
FEE6 ﻦ |
FEE8 ﻨ |
FEE7 ﻧ |
nūn | n | /n/ |
0647 ه |
FEE9 ﻩ |
FEEA ﻪ |
FEEC ﻬ |
FEEB ﻫ |
hāʾ | h | /h/ |
0648 و |
FEED ﻭ |
FEEE ﻮ |
— | wāw | w / ū | /w/ / /uː/ | |
064A ي |
FEF1 ﻱ |
FEF2 ﻲ |
FEF4 ﻴ |
FEF3 ﻳ |
yāʾ | y / ī | /j/ / /iː/ |
I've tried to make these two sections more user-friendly, as I think the normal person coming to this article will be a beginner-learner of Arabic. PiCo ( talk) 05:06, 25 June 2009 (UTC)
I would like to propose a link to a free course of the Arabic Alphabet:
The course is not made by me (albeit it is hosted on my website). I think it genuinely is a useful resource. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lyzazel ( talk • contribs) 16:50, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
Where the names of the letters are wikilinked, the underlining means that underbars to the letters disappear (and underdots etc become very indistinct); "tāʾ" and "ṯāʾ" are seen to be different - tāʾ and ṯāʾ render identically (in my browser, anyway). Not sure what a solution is - possibly something like ṯāʾ ( article), although that's very messy. Pseudomonas( talk) 09:34, 19 October 2009 (UTC)
Since the Arabic writing system is technically not an alphabet (it is an abjad), wouldn't it be more appropriate to move this article to Arabic script? GSMR ( talk) 18:19, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
The parent is Egyptian hieroglyphs>>Proto-Sinaitic in parent and systems form like all letter systems on wikipedia, so that, it should be like this:
Parent : Egyptian hieroglyphs systems: Proto-Sinaitic
Proto-Canaanite alphabet Phoenician alphabet Aramaic alphabet Nabataean Arabic abjad
Thank you very much,
According to the language map ("Worldwide use of the Arabic alphabet"), Pakistan is a country "where the Arabic script is the only official orthography". However, English is an official language of Pakistan, so doesn't that mean that the Latin alphabet must also have official status? 86.161.43.54 ( talk) 14:36, 22 March 2010 (UTC).
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