The Arabic Alfabet

Many of my visitors do not know any Arabic
And therefore also know no Arabic characters
So I decided to give a little lesson so that all of you will
know the names of the characters in the Arabic alfabet.

When you put your mouse pointer (arrow) on the pictures, you are shown how to write
the character, when you click the picture, you'll be taken to the "Writing tips and tricks" page.

Since this page is under construction, the pictures showing how to write the character when you put your mouse on them will be marked (*)

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The Alef is the first character in the Arabic alfabet, it has 2 shapes only:
an initial and single shape, which you can see on the left,
and a final and middle shape, which is shown on the right, the Alef is
never attached to its left.
 

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The second is Ba` it comes in 4 shapes, shown here from right to left:
initial-, middle-, end-, and as a single character.
 

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Next comes Ta`, (hence the name alfabet), again in 4 shapes.
 

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The next is Tha`
As you can see there is only one dot difference between them.
In origin the Arab alfabet did not have any dots at all
(nor did the Hebrew, Greek or Roman alfabets), you had to more or less
guess what was written there.
The Persians adapted the Arab alfabet for their own use by adding dots,
a fashion later to be followed by both Arabs and Europeans (note i and j).
The usage of dots to indicate different characters is called "naqt" or "i`jam".
 

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The next 3 characters have again only a single dot difference between them
First comes Jeem.
As you can see there are two ways to connect it to its right hand neighbour:
over the top and around the bottom, the one at the end has a swooping tail and is
almost allways connected over its top.
 

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The next is Ha`, it has no dot.
 

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The third is Kha` with its dot on top.
 

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Next, again two characters that differ only a single dot, the first one
(above) is Dal, the second one (below) is Thal.
 

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As you can see these have only 3 forms (well 2 really):
initial, end, and single.
Of course this means that Dal and Thal are never connected
to their left.
 

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Again these next two characters; Ra` (above) and
Zay (below) differ only a single dot.
 

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As you can guess, they both are never connected to their left
and so they have only two versions;
the initial and "solo" version and the end version.

 

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