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Arabic alphabet
ﺍ     ﺍ     ﺏ     ﺕ     ﺙ     ﺝ
ﺡ     ﺥ     ﺩ     ﺫ     ﺭ     ﺭ
?     ﺵ     ﺹ     ﺽ     ﻁ     ﻅ
ﻉ     ﻍ     ﻑ     ﻕ     ﻙ
ﻝ     ﻡ     ﻥ     ه‍     ﻭ
History · Transliteration Diacritics · Hamza ﻱ Numerals · Numeration  •  • [ e]

The history of the Arabic alphabet shows that this abjad has changed since it arose. It is thought that the Arabic alphabet is a derivative of the Nabataean variation (or perhaps the Syriac variation) of the Aramaic alphabet, which descended from the Phoenician alphabet, which among others gave rise to the Hebrew alphabet and the Greek alphabet, (and therefore the Cyrillic and Roman alphabets, etc).

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, in what is now Jordan. 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 (known as "monumental Nabataean") and the other, more cursive and hurriedly written and with joined letters, for writing on papyrus. 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, Syriac and Arabic found at Zabad in Syria. This version of the Arabic alphabet used includes only 22 letters, of which only 15 are different, being used to note 28 phonemes:-



A fair number of Arabian inscriptions survive from the pre-Islamic era, but very few are in the Arabic alphabet. Some are in the Arabic language, or its closest relatives including:-

• The Thamudic, Lihyanic, and Safaitic inscriptions in the north.
• Nabataean inscriptions in Aramaic and Arabic.
• Inscriptions in other languages, such as Syriac.
• Pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions in the Arabic alphabet: 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.

Name	Whereabouts	Date	Language	Alphabet	Text & notes
En Avdat	Negev in Israel	between AD 88 and 150	4 lines Aramaic, then 2 lines Arabic	Nabataean with a little letter-joining	prayer of thanks to the god Obodas for saving someone's life
Umm al-Jimāl	west of Hauran plateau in Syria	roughly end of 3th century AD	Aramaic-Nabataean	Nabataean, much letter-joining #	also Greek
Raqush (this is not a place-name)	Mada'in Salih in Saudi Arabia	AD 267	mixture of Arabic and Aramaic	Nabataean, some letter-joining. Has a few diacritic dots.	Last inscription in Nabataean language. Epitaph to one Raqush, including curse against grave-violaters.
an-Namāra	100km SE of Damascus	AD 328-329	Arabic	Nabataean, more letter-joining than previous #	a long epitaph for the famous Arab poet and war-leader Imru'ul-Qays, describing his war deeds
Jabal Ramm	50 km east of Aqaba	3rd or likelier late 4th century AD	3 lines in Arabic, 1 bent line in Thamudic	Arabic. Has some diacritic dots.	In a temple of Allat. Boast or thanks of an energetic man who made his fortune.
Sakakah	in Saudi Arabia	undated	Arabic	Arabic, some Nabataean features, & dots	short; reading unclear
Sakakah	in Saudi Arabia	3rd or 4th century AD	Arabic	Arabic	"Hama son of Garm"
Sakakah	in Saudi Arabia	4th century AD	Arabic	Arabic	"B-`-s-w son of `Abd-Imru'-al-Qais son of Mal(i)k"
Umm al-Jimāl	west of Hauran plateau in Syria	4th or 5th century AD	Arabic	similar to Arabic #	"This was set up by colleagues of 'Ulayh son of `Ubaydah, secretary of the cohort Augusta Secunda Philadelphiana; may he go mad who effaces it."
Zabad	in Syria, south of Aleppo	AD 512	Arabic	Arabic #	Also Greek and Syriac. Christian dedicatory. The Arabic says "God's help" & 6 names. "God" is spelt with an ambiguous reading: see Allah#Typography.
Jabal Usays	in Syria	AD 528	Arabic	Arabic	Record of a military expedition by one Ibrahim ibn Mughirah on behalf of the king al-Harith (presumably al-Harith ibn Jabalah (Aretas in Greek), king of the Ghassanid vassals of the Byzantines)
Harrān	in Leija district, south of Damascus	AD 568	Arabic	Arabic #	Also Greek. Christian dedicatory, in a martyrium. It records Sharahil ibn Zalim building the martyrium a year after the destruction of Khaybar.

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 [1] 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 ğ,
H also represented kh %,
T also represented Z,
ayin also represented gh %,
S also represented D,
t also represented ş.
: In the cases marked %, the choice was influenced by etymology, as Common Semitic kh and gh became Hebrew H 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 at .
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 many 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 H 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 H kh), and 4 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

In the 7th century AD, the Arabic alphabet is attested in its classical form. 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, it was realized that deciding by context in each case did not solve all the various ambiguities that resulted when reading Arabic text, and a proper cure was needed. 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 of 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 partially to avoid the great ambiguity of the script, as well as the scarcity of books in times when printing was unheard-of 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), sh (500), kh (600), dh (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" or kutiba = "it was written". 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 by 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 gave 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 being 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 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 two letters.

Some features of the Arabic alphabet arose because of differences between Qur'anic spelling (which followed the Makkan 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 was often pronounced as -ah and written as h. To avoid altering Quranic spelling, the dots of t were written over the h.
• y 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.
• 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 hāğā = "this"), it may be that the Makkan dialect pronounced those vowels short.
• hamza: Originally alif spelt the glottal stop. But Makkans did not pronounce the glottal stop, but replaced it by w or y or nothing, or lengthened an adjacent vowel, or between vowels dropped the glottal stop and contracted the vowels; and the Qur'an was written following Makkan 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 Maghrib.



(Greek waw = 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 = 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

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: 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 sign like a Roman b letter 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		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

• Abjad
• Levantine order
• Writing

References