Unicode Demystified

The Arabic Alphabet

The Arabic alphabet, like the Hebrew alphabet, evolved from the ancient Aramaic alphabet, but developed quite a bit later. The first inscriptions using the Arabic alphabet date from the fourth century A.D.^[4] Unlike the Hebrew alphabet, the Arabic alphabet developed from a cursive form of the Aramaic alphabet, where the letters are connected and words are written without lifting the pen. As the letters became more connected, they also started to look more the same, eventually evolving into 14 families of similarly shaped letters in a 28-letter alphabet. Marks used to differentiate between letters with the same shape were developed sometime during the seventh century; the patterns of dots used for this purpose today date to ...