History of the Arabic alphabet: Encyclopedia II - History of the Arabic alphabet - Early Islamic changes

History of the Arabic alphabet - Early Islamic changes

In the 7th century AD, the Arabic alphabet is attested in its classical form.
See PERF 558 for the first surviving Islamic Arabic writing.

In the 7th century AD, probably in the early years of Islam while writing down the Qur'an, it was realized that deciding by context in each case did not solve all the various ambiguities that resulted when reading Arabic text, and a proper cure was needed. Writings in the Nabataean and Syriac alphabets already had sporadic examples of dots being used to distinguish letters which had become identical, for example as in the table at http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:D_r_nabat_syriaque.png .
By analogy of this, a system of dots was added to the Arabic alphabet to make enough different letters for Classical Arabic's 28 phonemes. Sometimes the resulting new letters were put in alphabetical order after their un-dotted originals, and sometimes at the end.

The first surviving document that definitely uses these dots is also the first surviving Arabic papyrus (PERF 558), dated April 643 AD. The dots did not become obligatory until much later. Important texts like the Qur'an were frequently memorized; this practice, which survives even today, probably arose partially to avoid the great ambiguity of the script, as well as the scarcity of books in times when printing was unheard-of and every copy of every book had to be written by hand.

The alphabet then had 28 letters, and so could be used to write the numbers 1 to 10, then 20 to 100, then 200 to 900, then 1000 (see Abjad numerals). In this numerical order, the new letters were put at the end of the alphabet. This produced this order: alif (1), b (2), j (3), d (4), h (5), w (6), z (7), H (8), T (9), y (10), k (20), l (30), m (40), n (50), s (60), ayn (70), f (80), S (90), q (100), r (200), sh (300), t (400), sh (500), kh (600), dh (700), D (800), Z (900), gh (1000).

The lack of vowel signs in Arabic writing created more ambiguities: for example, in Classical Arabic ktb could be kataba = "he wrote" or kutiba = "it was written". Later, vowel signs and hamzas were added, beginning some time in the last half of the sixth century, at about the same time as the first invention of Syriac and Hebrew vocalization. Initially, this was done by a system of red dots, said to have been commissioned by an Umayyad governor of Iraq, Hajjaj ibn Yusuf: a dot above = a, a dot below = i, a dot on the line = u, and doubled dots gave tanwin. However, this was cumbersome and easily confusable with the letter-distinguishing dots, so about 100 years later, the modern system was adopted. The system was finalized around 786 by al-Farahidi.

When new signs were added to the Arabic alphabet, they took the alphabetical order value of the letter which were an alternative for: tā' marbūta took the value of ordinary t, and not of h.. In the same way, the many diacritics do not have any value: for example, a doubled consonant indicated by shadda, does not count as two letters.

Some features of the Arabic alphabet arose because of differences between Qur'anic spelling (which followed the Makkan dialect pronunciation used by Muhammad and his first followers) and the standard Classical Arabic. These include:-

• tā' marbūta: This arose because the -at- ending of feminine nouns was often pronounced as -ah and written as h. To avoid altering Quranic spelling, the dots of t were written over the h.
• y used to spell ā at the ends of some words: This arose because ā arising from contraction where single y dropped out between vowels, was in some dialects pronounced at the ends of words with the tongue further forward than for other ā vowels, and as a result in the Qu'ran it was written as y.
• ā not written as alif in some words: The Arabic spelling of Allāh was decided before the Arabs started using alif to spell ā. In other cases (for example the first ā in hāðā = "this"), it may be that the Makkan dialect pronounced those vowels short.
• hamza: Originally alif spelt the glottal stop. But Makkans did not pronounce the glottal stop, but replaced it by w or y or nothing, or lengthened an adjacent vowel, or between vowels dropped the glottal stop and contracted the vowels; and the Qur'an was written following Makkan pronunciation. The Arabic grammarians invented the hamza diacritic sign and used it to mark the glottal stop. hamza is Arabic for "hook".

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Early Islamic changes", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki