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''If certain characters in this article display badly (as empty squares, question marks, etc), see Unicode .'' 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 itself descended from the Phoenician alphabet, which among others gave rise to the Hebrew Alphabet and the Greek Alphabet , (and therefore the Cyrillic and Roman Alphabet s, 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:
PRE-ISLAMIC ARABIC INSCRIPTIONS The first recorded text in the Arabic alphabet was written in 512 AD. 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 Phoneme s:- A fair number of Arabia n Inscription s survive from the pre- Islam ic era, but, very few are in the Arabic Alphabet . Some are in the Arabic Language , or its closest relatives including:-
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 Epigraph ic 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 (note: Islamic Point Of View on that web site.) See http://home.student.uva.nl/rogier.visser/ac/nabatean.html for pictures (without transcriptions or translations) of the inscriptions marked # in the table. The Nabataean alphabet was designed to write 22 Phoneme s, 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'', ''H'' also represented ''kh'' %, ''T'' also represented ''Z'', ''ayin'' also represented ''gh'' %, ''S'' also represented ''D'', ''t'' also represented ''þ''. : 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 http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Arabe_arch.png . 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 http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hebreu_hist_arabe.png . (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 at http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:D_r_nabat_syriaque.png . 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 643 AD. 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 ''. 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 . When new signs were added to the Arabic alphabet, they took the alphabetical order value of the letter which 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:-
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 3 dots above or below:-
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