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Someone more familiar with Arabic may need to correct me, however I was under the impression that the shape of the letters is not at all affected by the letters
by hetman 15y ago
Someone more familiar with Arabic may need to correct me, however I was under the impression that the shape of the letters is not at all affected by the letters it follows, but by their position in the word.
Arabic letters look different depending on whether they are in the initial, medial, final position in a word (as well as having a 4th form when they appear in isolation). However, there are patterns of similarity so it's not as difficult as having to learn 4 completely random shapes for each letter.
- idlewords 15y agoNot quite. There are several letters that don't connect to the letter that follows them, so a letter that follows them will appear in the 'initial' form even though it's not at a word boundary.
- Cushman 15y agoThat would be me :) No, the preceding letter matters. Some letters (د،ذ،ر،ز،ؤ) have no medial form-- they take the terminal form instead, and the following letter takes the initial form. There are patterns (17 by my count?) among which letters differ only minorly, so it's not as bad as learning four forms for each letter, but there are some additional gotchas too. For example "ل-ا" ("laa") is always written as a single character "lamalif": لا. (Bonus knowledge: that's also the word for "no". You can see it at the beginning of the Shahada: ...لا إله إلا الله <- "There is no god but God..." etc.)