Ṯāʾ

Ṯāʾ (ث) is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being ḫāʾ, ḏāl, ḍād, ẓāʾ, ġayn). In Modern Standard Arabic it represents the voiceless dental fricative [θ], also found in English as the "th" in words such as "think" and "thin". In name and shape, it is a variant of tāʾ (ت). Its numerical value is 500 (see Abjad numerals).

In contemporary spoken Arabic, pronunciation of ṯāʾ as [θ] is found in the Gulf, Iraqi, and Tunisian dialects and in highly educated pronunciations of Modern Standard and Classical Arabic. Pronunciation of the letter varies between and within the various varieties of Arabic: while it is consistently pronounced as the voiceless dental plosive [t] in Maghrebi Arabic, in the Arabic varieties of the Mashriq (in the broad sense, including Egyptian, Sudanese and Levantine), it can be pronounced as either [t] or as the sibilant voiceless alveolar fricative [s]. Depending on the word in question, words pronounced as [s] are generally more technical or "sophisticated." Regardless of these regional differences, the pattern of the speaker's variety of Arabic frequently intrudes into otherwise Modern Standard speech; this is widely accepted, and is the norm when speaking the mesolect known alternately as lugha wusṭā ("middling/compromise language") or ʿAmmiyyat/Dārijat al-Muṯaqqafīn ("Educated/Cultured Colloquial") used in the informal speech of educated Arabs of different countries.

Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet (Arabic: الأَبْجَدِيَّة العَرَبِيَّة‎ al-abjadīyah al-ʻarabīyah or الحُرُوف العَرَبِيَّة al-ḥurūf al-ʻarabīyah) or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters. Because letters usually stand for consonants, it is classified as an abjad.

Consonants

The basic Arabic alphabet contains 28 letters. Adaptations of the Arabic script for other languages added and removed some letters, as for Kurdish, Ottoman, Sindhi, Urdu, Malay, Pashto, and Arabi Malayalam, all of which have additional letters as shown below. There are no distinct upper and lower case letter forms.

Many letters look similar but are distinguished from one another by dots (i‘jām) above or below their central part (rasm). These dots are an integral part of a letter, since they distinguish between letters that represent different sounds. For example, the Arabic letters transliterated as b and t have the same basic shape, but b has one dot below, ب, and t has two dots above, ت.

Arabic script

The Arabic script is a writing system used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic, dialects of Mandinka, the Sorani and Luri dialects of Kurdish, Persian, Urdu, Pashto, and others. Even until the 16th century, it was used to write some texts in Spanish. It is the third-most widely used writing system in the world, after Latin and Chinese.

The Arabic script is written from right to left in a cursive style. In most cases the letters transcribe consonants, or consonants and a few vowels, so most Arabic alphabets are abjads.

The script was first used to write texts in Arabic, most notably the Qurʼān, the holy book of Islam. With the spread of Islam, it came to be used to write languages of many language families, leading to the addition of new letters and other symbols, with some versions, such as Kurdish, Uyghur, and old Bosnian being abugidas or true alphabets. It is also the basis for the tradition of Arabic calligraphy.

The Arabic script has the ISO 15924 codes Arab and 160.

Arabic

Arabic (/ˈærəbɪk/;Arabic: العَرَبِية‎, al-ʻarabiyyah [alʕaraˈbijja] or Arabic: عربي ,عربى‎ ʻarabī [ˈʕarabiː]) is the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century and its modern descendants excluding Maltese. Arabic is spoken in a wide arc stretching across Western Asia, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa. Arabic belongs to the Afroasiatic family.

The literary language, called Modern Standard Arabic or Literary Arabic, is the only official form of Arabic. It is used in most written documents as well as in formal spoken occasions, such as lectures and news broadcasts.

Arabic is a Central Semitic language, closely related to Aramaic, Hebrew, Ugaritic and Phoenician. Standard Arabic is distinct from and more conservative than all of the spoken varieties, and the two exist in a state known as diglossia, used side-by-side for different societal functions.

Some of the spoken varieties are mutually unintelligible, both written and orally, and the varieties as a whole constitute a sociolinguistic language. This means that on purely linguistic grounds they would likely be considered to constitute more than one language, but are commonly grouped together as a single language for political or religious reasons (see below). If considered multiple languages, it is unclear how many languages there would be, as the spoken varieties form a dialect chain with no clear boundaries. If Arabic is considered a single language, it is perhaps spoken by as many as 422 million speakers (native and non-native) in the Arab world, making it one of the six most-spoken languages in the world. If considered separate languages, the most-spoken variety would most likely be Egyptian Arabic with 89 million native speakers—still greater than any other Afroasiatic language. Arabic also is a liturgical language of 1.6 billion Muslims. It is one of six official languages of the United Nations.

Alphabet song

An alphabet song is any of various songs used to teach children an alphabet. Alphabet songs typically follow the alphabetic principle (though the phonics method offers variants). In languages such as English with morphophonemic variation (e.g. "cake" is /ˈkeɪk/, not [ˈkaːkɛ]), an alphabet song usually chooses a particular pronunciation for each letter in the alphabet and also typically for some words in the song.

The A.B.C. (Verse 1)

"The A.B.C." /ˌeɪˌbiːˈsiː/ or "A.B.Cs" /ˌeɪˌbiːˈsiːz/ is one of the best-known English language alphabet songs, and perhaps the one most frequently referred to as "the alphabet song", especially in the United States.

The song was first copyrighted in 1835 by the Boston-based music publisher Charles Bradlee, and given the title "The A.B.C., a German air with variations for the flute with an easy accompaniment for the piano forte". The musical arrangement was attributed to Louis Le Maire (sometimes Lemaire), an 18th-century composer. This was "Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1835, by C. Bradlee, in the clerk's office of the District Court of Massachusetts", according to the Newberry Library, which also says, "The theme is that used by Mozart for his piano variations, Ah, vous dirai-je, maman." This tune is the same as the tune for "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep".