Arabic alphabet
The Arabic alphabet is a set of characters used to write the Arabic language, as well as several other unrelated languages in the Middle East and Asia (for example, Farsi). It is based on the Phoenician alphabet, from which the Hebrew and Greek alphabets are also descended. Unlike its sister scripts, the Arabic alphabet is cursive, and often each letter has several variants depending on their position in a word.
Like Hebrew, Arabic is not a true alphabet, and can more accurately be described as an abjad: that is, a set of characters with no specific symbols for vowels. Instead, diacritical marks (harakat) are used to render short vowels, and the consonants ʾalif, waw, and ya are used to render long vowels (similar to matres lectionis in Hebrew). However, which letters and which diacritics are used largely depends on the national of the alphabet.
