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Font: Arabic
Derived from Nabatean, an ancient Semitic script, Arabic script
is an alphabet of 28 basic letters of which 25 are consonants, while
three letters double as semi-vowels and long vowels. The
overwhelmingly consonantal nature of the Arabic alphabet is well
suited to the Semitic roots of the Arabic language. In fact, the
writing systems of most Semitic languages (see also Hebrew &
Syriac) follow the same basic model which can be traced back to
Phoenician script. Written from right to left, Arabic is a cursive
script in which most letters connect with their neighbors. Arabic
script has no block letters, nor does it distinguish letters as
upper or lower case. Instead, each letter can have up to four
contextual forms: initial, medial, final and separate. When
necessary, short vowels and consonant lengthening (gemination) can
be indicated by means of small, unattached diacritic marks above and
below the basic letters. However, it should be noted that the use of
diacritics is usually restricted to Koranic, educational, poetic and
unusually complex texts. For instance, diacritics almost never
appear in newspapers. Although Arabic text flows in general from
right to left, numbers, which are referred to as 'Indian numbers',
are written from left to right. For this reason, Arabic script is
sometimes described as bidirectional.
Since the Nabatean language had fewer sounds than Arabic, the
first forms of Arabic script suffered some deficiencies. The Arabic
alphabet in its earliest stages consisted of only 15 consonant
letters, many of which stood for more than one sound. With time, the
sound represented by each letter was made unambiguous through the
addition of dots, a distinctive feature borrowed from Syriac script.
Also of great importance was the use of some letters to represent
both consonants and long vowels. For instance, alef,
originally used only for the glottal stop, began to be used also for
the long vowel [a:]. Similarly, waw was used as both [w] and
[u:]. At a later stage, small diacritics were added to represent
short vowels as needed. As the repertoire of Arabic literary texts
grew, these developments gained momentum. Even though Arabic script
is best suited to Semitic languages, it is, or has been at one time,
used to write the following languages which belong to other language
families: Farsi, Turkish, Urdu, Pashto, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Malay,
Uighur, Hausa, Swahili, etc. In order to accommodate the non-Arabic
sounds of these languages, new letters were formed through new
combinations of dot diacritics and small appendages with basic
Arabic symbols. While it is commonly known that the Latin script has
been used for writing more languages than any other script, few
recognize that Arabic script follows in second place. The global
spread of Islam has been instrumental in the simultaneous spread of
Arabic script. Because of the dominant role of calligraphy in
Islamic arts, many diverse styles of Arabic script have flourished
over the centuries. Among the best known of these calligraphic
styles are Naskh, Kufi, Ruqaa, Nastaliq, Maghribi, Diwani and
Thuluth.
Design acknowledgement: Noori Nastaliq typeface and
ligature system was designed by Ahmed Mirza Jamil TI. Because of its
calligraphic nature, Noori Nastaliq is not available as a standard
font for the common hardware platforms. The addressing of this font
requires specially customized software and ligature access
tables.
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