ABOUT ARABIC
Although Arabic uses only 28 characters, it’s a lot more complex than a language like English because the characters themselves exhibit properties you might not have encountered before. Arabic is a cursive script, in which most characters join together, end to end. This “joining” property means that characters change shape based on their positions within a word. Most Arabic characters have three forms: initial, medial, and final. To see how joining works, the three characters shown in Figure 3, when combined, form the Arabic word for “river”: nahr.
Figure 3. The three characters seen individually.
When the characters are joined ...
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