The history of the Arabic alphabet The Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic and Urdu. After the Latin alphabet, it is the second-most widely used alphabet around the world shows that this abjad An abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel. It is a term suggested by Peter T. Daniels to replace the common terms consonantary or consonantal alphabet or syllabary to refer to the family of scripts called West Semitic. In popular usage, abjads has changed since it arose. It is thought that the Arabic alphabet is a derivative of the Nabataean The Nabataean alphabet is a consonantal alphabet that was used by the Nabataeans in the 2nd century BC. Important inscriptions are found in Petra. The alphabet is descended from the Aramaic alphabet via the Syriac alphabet. It in turn developed into the Arabic alphabet from the 4th century, which is why its letterforms are intermediate between the variation (or perhaps the Syriac The Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language from around the 2nd century BC. It is one of the Semitic abjads directly descending from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet and shares similarities with the Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets variation) of the Aramaic alphabet The Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet, and became distinctive from it by the 8th century BCE. The letters all represent consonants, some of which are matres lectionis, which also indicate long vowels, which descended from the Phoenician alphabet The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. It has been classified as an abjad because it records only, which among others gave rise to the Hebrew alphabet The Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, and because of its place of origin, the Assyrian script (not to be confused with the Syriac alphabet). The alphabet is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic and the Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It is the first and oldest alphabet in the narrow sense that it notes each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol. It is as such in continuous use to this day. The letters were also used to represent, (and therefore the Cyrillic The Cyrillic script is an alphabet developed in the 9th century in Bulgaria, and used in the Slavic national languages of Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Ukrainian, and in the non-Slavic languages of Bashkir, Moldovan, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Tuvan, and Mongolian. It also was used in past and Roman The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was borrowed and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome, whose alphabet was then adapted and further modified by the ancient alphabets An alphabet is a standardized set of letters — basic written symbols or graphemes — each of which roughly represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic unit, and syllabaries, in which, etc).
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Origins
The Arabic alphabet evolved either from the Nabataean, or (less widely believed) from the Syriac. This table shows changes undergone by the shapes of the letters from the Aramaic original to the Nabataean and Syriac forms. Arabic is placed in the middle for clarity and not to mark a time order of evolution.
It seems that the Nabataean alphabet became the Arabic alphabet thus:
- In the 6th and 5th centuries BC, north-Semitic tribes immigrated and founded a kingdom centered around Petra Petra (Greek "πέτρα" , meaning rock; Arabic: البتراء, Al-Batrāʾ) is a historic and archaeological city in the Jordanian governorate of Ma'an that has rock cut architecture and water conduits system. Established sometime around the 6th century BC as the capital city of the Nabataeans, it is a symbol of Jordan as well as its, in what is now Jordan Jordan , officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, is a country in Western Asia. It borders Saudi Arabia to the southeast, Iraq to the east, Syria to the north, Palestine and Israel to the west, sharing control of the Dead Sea. Jordan's only port is at its southern tip, at the Red Sea's Gulf of Aqaba, which it shares with Israel, Egypt, and. These people (now named Nabataeans from the name of one of the tribes, Naba?u), probably spoke a form of Arabic.
- In the 2nd century AD, the first known records of the Nabataean alphabet were written, in the Aramaic language (which was the language of communication and trade), but including some Arabic language features: the Nabataeans did not write the language which they spoke. They wrote in a form of the Aramaic alphabet, which continued to evolve; it separated into two forms: one intended for inscriptions Epigraphy is the study of inscriptions or epigraphs as writing; that is, the science of identifying the graphemes and of classifying their use as to cultural context and date, elucidating their meaning and assessing what conclusions can be deduced concerning the writing and the writers. Specifically excluded from epigraphy is the historical (known as "monumental Nabataean") and the other, more cursive and hurriedly written and with joined letters, for writing on papyrus Papyrus is a thick paper-like material produced from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland sedge that was once abundant in the Nile Delta of Egypt. This cursive form influenced the monumental form more and more and gradually changed into the Arabic alphabet.
Pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions
The first recorded text in the Arabic alphabet was written in AD 512. It is a trilingual dedication in Greek Greek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical ancient Greek literature and the New Testament of, Syriac Syriac is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. Classical Syriac became a major literary language throughout the Middle East from the 4th to the 8th centuries, the classical language of Edessa, preserved in a large body of Syriac literature and Arabic Arabic (العربية al-ʿarabīyah, ( Arabic pronunciation ) or عربي ʿarabi) is a Central Semitic language, thus related to and classified alongside other Semitic languages such as Hebrew and the Neo-Aramaic languages. Arabic has more speakers than any other language in the Semitic language family. It is spoken by more than 280 million found at Zabad in Syria Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic (Arabic: الجمهورية العربية السورية), is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest. This version of the Arabic alphabet used includes only 22 letters, of which only 15 are different, being used to note 28 phonemes In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances:-
Around 50,000 Arabian inscriptions survived from the pre-Islamic Islam (Arabic: الإسلام al-’islām, pronounced [ʔislæːm] [note 1]) is the monotheistic religion articulated by the Qur’an, a text considered by its adherents to be the verbatim word of their one, incomparable God (Arabic: الله, Allāh), and by the Prophet of Islam Muhammad's teachings and normative example (in Arabic called era. Most of which are in Ancient North Arabian Ancient North Arabian is a language known from fragmentary inscriptions in Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia, dating to between roughly the 6th century BC and the 6th century AD, all written in scripts derived from Epigraphic South Arabian. Pre-classical Arabic , the predecessor of Classical Arabic, seems to have coexisted with these languages languages. However these are written in alphabets borrowed from epigraphic South Arabian alphabets. Such as:
- The Thamudic Thamudic is an Old North Arabian dialect known from pre-Islamic inscriptions scattered across the Arabian desert and the Sinai. Dating to between the 4th century BC and the 3rd or 4th century AD, they were incorrectly named after the Thamud people, with whom they are not directly associated, Lihyanic, Taymanitic, Dumaitic and Safaitic Safaitic is the name given to an Old North Arabian dialect, preserved in the form of inscriptions which are written in a type of South Semitic script. These inscriptions were written by bedouin and semi-nomadic inhabitants of the Syro-Arabian desert. Dating of the inscriptions, although problematic, is conventionally placed between the 1st century inscriptions in the north.
- Hasaitic in the eastern part of Arabia
- Hismaic in the southern parts of central Arabia.
Preclassical and Classical Arabic Classical Arabic , also known as Qur'anic or Koranic Arabic, is the form of the Arabic language used in literary texts from Umayyad and Abbasid times (7th to 9th centuries). It is based on the Medieval dialects of Arab tribes. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the direct descendent used today throughout the Arab World in writing and in formal, however, are attested in a small number of inscriptions. Even fewer are in the Arabic alphabet The Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic and Urdu. After the Latin alphabet, it is the second-most widely used alphabet around the world. For example:
- Preclassical Arabic inscriptions dating to the 1st century BC from Qaryat Al-Faw, written in Epigraphic South Arabian alphabets.
- Nabataean inscriptions in Aramaic and Arabic. Written in Nabatean alphabets.
- Pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions in the Arabic alphabet The Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic and Urdu. After the Latin alphabet, it is the second-most widely used alphabet around the world: these are very few; only 5 are known for certain. These mostly do not use dots, making them sometimes difficult to interpret, as many letters are the same shape as other letters.
Here are listed the inscriptions in the Arabic alphabet, and the inscriptions in the Nabataean alphabet that show the beginnings of Arabic-like features.
Cursive Nabataean writing changed into Arabic writing, likeliest between the dates of the an-Namāra inscription and the Jabal Ramm inscription. Most writing would have been on perishable materials, such as papyrus. As it was cursive, it was liable to change. The epigraphic record is extremely sparse, with only five certainly pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions surviving, though some others may be pre-Islamic.
See http://www.islamic-awareness.org/History/Islam/Inscriptions/ for copies of these inscriptions.
The Nabataean alphabet was designed to write 22 phonemes, but Arabic has 28 phonemes; thus, when used to write the Arabic language, 6 of its letters must each represent two phonemes: d also represented ð, ħ also represented kh %, ṭ also represented ẓ, ayin also represented gh %, ṣ also represented ḍ, t also represented þ. : In the cases marked %, the choice was influenced by etymology, as Common Semitic kh and gh became Hebrew ħ and ayin respectively.
As cursive Nabataean writing evolved into Arabic writing, the writing became largely joined-up. Some the letters became the same shape as other letters, producing more ambiguities, as in the table . There the Arabic letters are listed in the traditional Levantine order but are written in their current forms, for simplicity. The letters which are the same shape have coloured backgrounds. The second value of the letters that represent more than one phoneme is after a comma. In these tables, ğ is j as in English "June". In the Arabic language, the g sound seems to have changed into j in fairly late pre-Islamic times, and seems not to have happened in those tribes who invaded Egypt and settled there.
When a letter was at the end of a word, it often developed an end loop, and as a result most Arabic letters have two or more shapes. b and n and t became the same. y became the same as b and n and t except at the ends of words. j and ħ became the same. z and r became the same. s and sh became the same.
After all this, there were only 17 letters which are different in shape. One letter-shape represented 5 phonemes (b t th n and sometimes y), one represented 3 phonemes (j ħ kh), and 5 each represented 2 phonemes. Compare the Hebrew alphabet, as in the table at .
(An analogy can be the Roman alphabet uppercase letters I and J: in the German Fraktur font they look the same but are officially different letters.)
Early Islamic changes
Table comparing Nabataean and Syriac forms of /d/ and /r/The Arabic alphabet is first attested in its classical form in the 7th century AD. See PERF 558 for the first surviving Islamic Arabic writing.
In the 7th century AD, probably in the early years of Islam while writing down the Qur'an, scribes realized that working out which of the amibnguous letters a particular letter was from context was laborious and not always possible, so a proper remedy was required. Writings in the Nabataean and Syriac alphabets already had sporadic examples of dots being used to distinguish letters which had become identical, for example as in the table on the right. By analogy with this, a system of dots was added to the Arabic alphabet to make enough different letters for Classical Arabic's 28 phonemes. Sometimes the resulting new letters were put in alphabetical order after their un-dotted originals, and sometimes at the end.
The first surviving document that definitely uses these dots is also the first surviving Arabic papyrus (PERF 558), dated April, AD 643. The dots did not become obligatory until much later. Important texts like the Qur'an were frequently memorized; this practice, which survives even today, probably arose partly to avoid the great ambiguity of the script, and partly due to the scarcity of books in times when printing was unheard-of in the area and every copy of every book had to be written by hand.
The alphabet then had 28 letters, and so could be used to write the numbers 1 to 10, then 20 to 100, then 200 to 900, then 1000 (see Abjad numerals). In this numerical order, the new letters were put at the end of the alphabet. This produced this order: alif (1), b (2), j (3), d (4), h (5), w (6), z (7), H (8), T (9), y (10), k (20), l (30), m (40), n (50), s (60), ayn (70), f (80), S (90), q (100), r (200), sh (300), t (400), th (500), dh (600), kh (700), D (800), Z (900), gh (1000).
The lack of vowel signs in Arabic writing created more ambiguities: for example, in Classical Arabic ktb could be kataba = "he wrote", kutiba = "it was written" or kutub="books". Later, vowel signs and hamzas were added, beginning some time in the last half of the sixth century, at about the same time as the first invention of Syriac and Hebrew vocalization. Initially, this was done using a system of red dots, said to have been commissioned by an Umayyad governor of Iraq, Hajjaj ibn Yusuf: a dot above = a, a dot below = i, a dot on the line = u, and doubled dots giving tanwin. However, this was cumbersome and easily confusable with the letter-distinguishing dots, so about 100 years later, the modern system was adopted. The system was finalized around 786 by al-Farahidi.
Before the historical decree by Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, all administrative texts were recorded by Persian scribes in Middle Persian language using Pahlavi script, but many of the initial orthographic alterations to the Arabic alphabet might have been proposed and implemented by the same scribes.
When new signs were added to the Arabic alphabet, they took the alphabetical order value of the letter which they were an alternative for: tā' marbūta (see also below) took the value of ordinary t, and not of h.. In the same way, the many diacritics do not have any value: for example, a doubled consonant indicated by shadda does not count as a letter separate from the single one.
Some features of the Arabic alphabet arose because of differences between Qur'anic spelling (which followed the Meccan dialect pronunciation used by Muhammad and his first followers) and the standard Classical Arabic. These include:
- tā' marbūta: This arose because the -at ending of feminine nouns (tā' marbūta) was often pronounced as -ah and written as h. To avoid altering Quranic spelling, the dots of t were written over the h.[citation needed]
- y (alif maksura ى) used to spell ā at the ends of some words: This arose because ā arising from contraction where single y dropped out between vowels was in some dialects pronounced at the ends of words with the tongue further forward than for other ā vowels, and as a result in the Qu'ran it was written as y.[clarification needed][citation needed]
- ā not written as alif in some words: The Arabic spelling of Allāh was decided before the Arabs started using alif to spell ā. In other cases (for example the first ā in hāðā = "this"), it may be that the Meccan dialect pronounced those vowels short.
- hamza: Originally alif was used to spell the glottal stop. But Meccans did not pronounce the glottal stop[verification needed], replacing it with w, y or nothing, lengthening an adjacent vowel, or, between vowels, dropping the glottal stop and contracting the vowels, and the Qur'an was written following Meccan pronunciation. The Arabic grammarians invented the hamza diacritic sign and used it to mark the glottal stop. Hamza is Arabic for "hook".
Reorganization of the alphabet
Less than a century later, Arab grammarians reorganized the alphabet, for reasons of teaching, putting letters next to other letters which were nearly the same shape. This produced a new order which was not the same as the numeric order, which became less important over time because it was being competed with by the Indian numerals and sometimes by the Greek numerals.
The Arabic grammarians of North Africa changed the new letters, which explains the differences between the alphabets of the East and the Maghreb.
(Greek waw = the original name of the digamma)
The old alphabetical order, as in the other alphabets shown here, is known as the Levantine or Abjadi order. If the letters are arranged by their numeric order, the Levantine order is restored:-
(Greek waw = the original name of the digamma)
(Note: here "numeric order" means the traditional values when these letters were used as numbers. See Arabic numerals, Greek numerals and Hebrew numerals for more details) This order is much the oldest. The first written records of the Arabic alphabet show why the order was changed.
Adapting the Arabic alphabet for other languages
| Persian | Urdu | Malay | Arwi | Egypt | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| p | b, three dots below | f, three dots above | ||||
| ch | j, three dots below | t-sh | ||||
| g | k with a double top | k with mark | j | |||
| zh | z, three dots above | |||||
| j | j, three dots below | |||||
| ng | gh, three dots above | gh, three dots below | ||||
| ny | n, three dots above | |||||
| v | w | w, one dot above | ||||
| retroflex | small ط above | |||||
When the Arabic alphabet spread to countries which used other languages, extra letters had to be invented to spell non-Arabic sounds. Usually the alteration was three dots above or below:-
- Persian and Urdu: p : b with three dots below.
- Persian and Urdu: ch : j with three dots below.
- Persian and Urdu: g : k with a double top.
- Persian and Urdu: zh : z with three dots above.
- in Egypt: g: j. That is because Egyptian Arabic has g where other Arabic dialects have j.
- in Egypt: j: j with three dots below, same as Persian and Urdu ch.
- in Egypt: ch: written as t-sh.
- Urdu: retroflex sounds: as the corresponding dentals but with a small letter ط above. (This problem in adapting a Semitic alphabet to write Indian languages also arose long before this: see Brahmi.)
- In South-East Asia: ng as in "sing": kh or gh, each with three dots above instead of one.
- This book[1] shows an example of ch (Polish cz) being written as s with three dots below, in an Arabic-Polish bilingual Quran for Muslim Tatars living in Poland.
Decline in use by non-Arabic states
Since around the beginning of the 20th century, several non-Arabic-speaking countries have stopped using the Arabic script, often changing to the Latin alphabet. Examples include:-
| Area used | Arabic spelling system | New spelling system | Date | Who ordered by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Some constituent republics in the Soviet Union | Persian-based spelling system, later Ottoman Turkish alphabet with alterations | Cyrillic | 1920's | Order from the Kremlin |
| Malaysia | Jawi script (which is still widely used in Brunei and Patani) | Latin alphabet | 19th century | British colonial administration |
| Turkey | Ottoman Turkish alphabet | Turkish alphabet | 1928 | Republic of Turkey government after the fall of the Ottoman Empire |
See also
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References
- ^ p.93, "The Koran, A Very Short Introduction" by Michael Cook, publ Oxford University Press, 2000 AD, ISBN 0-19-285344-9
Categories: Arabic script | Palaeography | History of writing
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