The Persian or Arabic alphabet is a writing system based on the Arabic script. Originally used exclusively for the Arabic language, the Arabic alphabet was adapted to the Persian language, adding four letters: پ, چ, ژ, and گ. Many languages that use the Arabic script add other letters. Besides the Persian alphabet itself, the Arabic script has been applied to the Urdu alphabet, Sindhi alphabet, Saraiki alphabet, Kurdish Sorani alphabet, Lurish , Ottoman Turkish alphabet, Balochi alphabet, Punjabi Shahmukhi script, Tatar, Azeri, and several others. In order to represent non-Arabic sounds, new letters were created by adding dots, lines, and other shapes to existing letters. For example, the retroflex sounds of Urdu are represented orthographically by adding a small ط above their non-retroflex counterparts: د and ڈ. The voiceless retroflex fricative of Pashto is represented in writing by adding a dot above and below the س letter, resulting in ښ. The Close back rounded vowel of Kurdish is written by writing two ﻭ, resulting in ﻭﻭ. The Arabic script is exclusively written cursively. That is, the majority of letters in a word connect to each other. This is also implemented on computers. Whenever the Arabic script is typed, the computer connects the letters to each other. Unconnected letters are not widely accepted. In Persian, as in Arabic, words are written from right to left while numbers are written from left to right. A characteristic feature of this script, possibly tracing back to Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, is that vowels are underrepresented. For example, in Classical Arabic, of the six vowels, the three short ones are normally entirely omitted (although certain diacritics are added to indicate them in special circumstances, notably in the Qur'an), while the three long ones are represented ambiguously by certain consonants. Only Kashmiri, Uyghur, Kyrgyz (in China), Kazakh (in China), Kurdish and (formerly) Bosnian, of the many languages using adaptations of this script, regularly indicate all vowels. Letters Below are the 32 letters of the modern Persian alphabet. Since the script is cursive, the appearance of a letter changes depending on its position: isolated, beginning (joined on the left), middle (joined on both sides), and end (joined on the right) of a word. The letter names are mostly identical to the ones used in Arabic, except for the Persian pronunciation of the consonants. The only ambiguous name is he used for both ﺡ and ه. For clarification, these are often called ḥe-ye jimi (literally "jim-like ḥe" after jim, the name for the letter ج that uses the same base form) and he-ye do-češm (literally "two-eyed he", after the contextual middle letterform ﻬ), respectively. Exceptions There are seven letters (و -- ژ -- ﺯ -- ﺭ -- ﺫ -- ﺩ -- ﺍ) in the Persian alphabet that do not connect to other letters like the rest of the letters in the alphabet. These seven letters do not have distinctive initial or medial forms but the isolated and the final forms are used instead because they do not allow for a connection to be made on the left hand side to the other letters in the word. For example, when the letter ا "alef" is at the beginning of a word such as اینجا "injā" (here), the initial/isolated form of "alef" is used. Or in the case of امروز "emruz" (today) the letter ﺮ "re" is the final form and the letter و "vāv" is the initial/isolated form, although they are in the middle of the word; ﺯ is the initial/isolated form, although it is at the end of the word. Diacritics Persian scripts has adopted a subset of Arabic diacritics which consists of fatḥah (), kasrah (), ḍammah ( or ), sukūn, tanwīn nasb () and tashdid. Other Arabic diacritics may be seen in Arabic words in a Persian text by the virtue of being Arabic. Other characters The following are not actual letters but different orthographical shapes for letters, and in the case of the lām alef, a ligature. As to ﺀ hamze, it has only a single graphic, since it is never tied to a preceding or following letter. However, it is sometimes 'seated' on a vāv, ye or alef, and in that case the seat behaves like an ordinary vāv, ye or alef respectively. Technically, hamze is not a letter but a diacritic. Although at first glance they may seem similar, there are many differences in the way the different languages use the alphabets. For example, similar words are written differently in Persian and Arabic, as they are used differently. Novel letters The main Persian letters are ا, ب, پ, ت, ج, چ, خ, د, ر, ز, ژ, س, ش, ف, ک, گ, ل, م, ن, و, ه, ی and other letters that came into it from Arabic literature. The Persian alphabet adds four letters to the Arabic alphabet,,, (ch in chair), (s in measure): Changes from the Arabic writing system Attribution: Article text available under CC-BY-SA Creative Commons image source in video

• published: 04 Dec 2013
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