10 Facts About Arabic script

1.

Arabic script is a writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa.

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2.

In most cases, the letters transcribe consonants, or consonants and a few vowels, so most Arabic script alphabets are abjads, with the versions used for some languages, such as Sorani, Uyghur, Mandarin, and Serbo-Croatian, being alphabets.

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3.

Arabic script alphabet is derived either from the Nabataean alphabet or directly from the Syriac alphabet, which are both derived from the Aramaic alphabet (which gave rise to the Hebrew alphabet), which, in turn, descended from the Phoenician alphabet.

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4.

Arabic script has been adapted for use in a wide variety of languages besides Arabic, including Persian, Malay and Urdu, which are not Semitic.

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5.

For example, the Arabic language lacks a voiceless bilabial plosive, therefore many languages add their own letter to represent in the script, though the specific letter used varies from language to language.

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6.

These modifications tend to fall into groups: Indian and Turkic languages written in the Arabic script tend to use the Persian modified letters, whereas the languages of Indonesia tend to imitate those of Jawi.

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7.

The modified version of the Arabic script originally devised for use with Persian is known as the Perso-Arabic script by scholars.

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8.

Today Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and China are the main non-Arabic script speaking states using the Arabic script alphabet to write one or more official national languages, including Azerbaijani, Baluchi, Brahui, Persian, Pashto, Central Kurdish, Urdu, Sindhi, Kashmiri, Punjabi and Uyghur.

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9.

An Arabic script alphabet is currently used for the following languages:.

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10.

However, renewed use of the Arabic script alphabet has occurred to a limited extent in Tajikistan, whose language's close resemblance to Persian allows direct use of publications from Afghanistan and Iran.

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