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16 unusual facts about Arabic alphabet


Antemoro people

Antemoro are also credited with introducing the written word to Madagascar using the Arabic alphabet to transcribe the language in a script called sorabe.

Bassem Breish

Bassem Breish (Arabic: باسم بريش, also spelled Bassem Breiche) is a Lebanese film director and writer, who was recently notable for being a member of the team which made Shankaboot, a Lebanese series available through the internet which has been described as "the world's first Arabic web drama".

Bedford Park, Bronx

Among the national symbols one may see strolling the neighborhood include the double-headed eagle (the emblem of Albania), the icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe (sacred to Catholic Mexicans), the shamrock of Ireland, the Arabic calligraphy of the shahadah (the Muslim profession of faith), or the coquí of Puerto Rico.

Bengali Language Movement

The government suggested that Bengali be written in Arabic script, as a potential solution to the language conflict.

Decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs

--Please give approximate date the hieroglyphs could no longer be read or deciphered. Which century?--> and were replaced by the Coptic and Arabic alphabets.

Gandhara

Semitic scripts were not used to write South Asian languages again until the arrival of Islam and subsequent adoption of the Persian-style Arabic alphabet for New Indo-Aryan languages like Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi and Kashmiri.

Gjergj Fishta

Participants of the congress accepted Fishta's proposal for the Latin Bashkimi alphabet to be the standard Albanian alphabet, rejecting proposals that the Arabic alphabet be used.

ISO/IEC 646

The Arabic alphabet is mapped to positions 0x41–0x5A and 0x60–0x6A, on top of both uppercase and lowercase Latin letters.

ISO/IEC 8859-6

It was designed to cover languages using the Arabic alphabet (though it does not include the extra letters needed to write most Arabic-script languages other than Arabic itself, such as Persian, Urdu, etc.).

Liber Linteus

They realised the text was potentially important, but wrongly concluded that it was a transliteration of the Egyptian Book of the Dead in the Arabic script.

Little Syria, Manhattan

Naoum and Salloum Mokarzel created the publication Al-Hoda, adapting the Linotype machine to produce text in the Arabic alphabet, which "made possible and immeasurably stimulated the growth of Arabic journalism in the Middle East."

Mongolian alphabets

Subjects from the Middle East hired into administrative functions would also often use Persian or Arabic scripts to write their Mongolian language documents.

Pre-Islamic scripts in Afghanistan

Afghanistan possesses a rich linguistic legacy of pre-Islamic scripts, which existed before being displaced by the Arabic alphabet, after the Islamic conquest of Afghanistan.

Robert Granjon

In 1578, he moved to Rome, where he worked on types for Oriental characters needed by the Catholic missionaries: Armenian (1579), Syriac (1580), Cyrillic (1582), and Arabic (1580-86).

The Life of the Last Prophet

After that time, he recorded only albums with Islamic themes, including recordings for children to learn both the Arabic alphabet and basic tenets of Islam.

Utenzi wa Shufaka

This copy, which is written in Arabic script, was sent by Ludwig Krapf from Africa (most probably, German East Africa) in 1854.


Aljamiado

In linguistic terms, the Aljamía is the use of the Arabic alphabet to transcribe the Romance language, which was used by some people in some areas of Al-Andalus as an everyday communication vehicle, while Arabic was reserved as the language of science, high culture and religion.

Comparison of Unicode encodings

The next 1,920 characters, U+0080 to U+07FF (encompassing the remainder of almost all Latin alphabets, and also Greek, Cyrillic, Coptic, Armenian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Tāna and N'Ko), requires 16 bits to encode in both UTF-8 and UTF-16, and 32 bits in UTF-32.

Typographic ligature

In the Arabic alphabet, historically a cursive derived from the Nabataean alphabet, most letters' shapes depend on whether they are followed (word-initial), preceded (word-final) or both (medial) by other letters.

Word divider

In languages which use the Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic alphabets, as well as other languages of Europe and the Mideast, the word divider is a blank space, or whitespace, a convention which is spreading, along with other aspects of European punctuation, to Asia and Africa.