LESSON NOTES

All About #2
Learn the Arabic Writing System

CONTENTS
2

Grammar

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GRAMMAR
The Focus of This Lesson is the Arabic Writing System

Arabic uses the Arabic alphabet as its writing system. The Arabic alphabet originated from
Aramaic, and although Arabic inscriptions appear most commonly after the birth of Islam in
the seventh century , the origin of the Arabic alphabet lies deeper in time.
The Nabataeans, who established a kingdom in what is modern-day Jordan from the second
century B.C., were Arabs. They wrote with a highly cursive Aramaic-derived alphabet that
would eventually evolve into the Arabic alphabet. The Nabataeans endured until the year 106
A.D., when they were conquered by the Romans.
Nabataean inscriptions continue to appear until the fourth century A.D., coinciding with the
first inscriptions in the Arabic alphabet, which are also found in Jordan.
The Arabic alphabet is used in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Baloch, Malay, Hausa in West
Africa, Mandinka, Swahili in East Africa, Balti, Brahui, Panjabi in Pakistan, Kashmiri, Sindhi in
India and Pakistan, Arwi in Sri Lanka, Uyghur in China, Kazakh in China, Kyrgyz in China,
Azerbaijani in Iran, Kurdish in Iraq and Iran, and the language of the former Ottoman Empire.
In order to accommodate the needs of these other languages, new letters and other symbols
have been added to the original alphabet.
The spoken dialects are used to communicate verbally while standard Arabic is used in the
written form.
Alphabet
The Arabic alphabet consists of three vowels and twenty-eight consonants. In total there are
twenty-eight characters.
Arabic does not have words written with separate letters, which is why each letter has three
forms: beginning, medial, and end, plus the isolated form.
If you know the Arabic alphabet, Hebrew, Amharic, Persian, and Turkish may be easier to
understand and learn also, mainly because these come from the same family, or use the
same alphabet system, also there is a lot of common words between them, so it all connects.

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ALL ABOUT #2 - LEARN T HE ARABI C WRI T I NG S YS T EM