Arabic-Script

The past few decades have witnessed an aesthetic trend in the Arabic Writing System and its well-known
calligraphic arts, which have exploited features of other writing systems, including Latin and Chinese scripts.
Although there are great differences between almost every aspect of the Arabic and Latin scripts, this trend has
blended certain characteristics of Arabic script with some features of Latin script.
This study examines this trend and its experiments and transitions, from the moment it first emerged until the
present day. It investigates the motivations underpinning the trend and analyzes its artistic and linguistic
characteristics, in which the researcher visually analyzes all possible details and disassembles both orthographic
items and calligraphic features into their basic essential scripts. The findings reveal an aesthetic and linguistic
trend that is substantial and significant, based on linguistic, cultural, and sociocultural factors, including
increased levels of communication, culturalism, advances in technology, transportation, migration, and
globalization. Script tools and features are used to divide the main trend into three sub-trends: 1) Script
switching, where scripts are interchanged at word-level; 2) Script fusion, where scripts are altered at letter-level;
and 3) Faux fonts, which dissolve certain features of Arabic script to mirror Latin script. All of the techniques
used to make Arabic script match Latin script have been shown to be culturally-induced and linguistically
informative, rather than merely aesthetic. The findings of this study also indicate that this new phenomenon is
likely to be in the early stages, with further developments expected to unfold in future.

El cruce de caminos que representa el gran archipiélago filipino entre China y el mundo islámico, entre Oriente y Occidente, ofrece todo un universo fascinante para la lengua española en Asia: traducciones chinas, la naturalización del romancero hispánico y del teatro de capa y espada, la expansión de la escritura prehispánica, la hispanización de las fuentes indígenas, las lenguas de Cavite y Zamboanga, el populismo del español de tienda, aljamiado hispano-moro. En efecto, más allá de la visión tradicional, el presente volumen muestra la extensión de formas pidginizadas de español en un continuum diastrático y diatópico que se extendía a lo largo de la geografía filipina, junto a variantes dialectales en los centros urbanos, afirmando la expansión inminente de la lengua española en Filipinas a finales del siglo XIX gracias a la penetración del idioma de tienda y la escolarización creciente. Como consecuencia del intervencionismo lingüístico estadounidense, la norma culta española fue postergada mientras se perpetuaba la diglosia de las lenguas autóctonas, trasladándose estos fenómenos al habla manileña, que constituye a día de hoy una lengua de cien millones de hablantes. La nueva política lingüística en torno al filipino y al chabacano señala el rumbo de una sociedad asiática en expansión donde la internacionalidad del español, siendo la lengua clásica del país, puede abrir un nuevo escenario en Filipinas. Isaac Donoso es editor de obras clásicas de la literatura filipina, entre ellas Noli me tangere y, en editorial Verbum, Prosa Selecta de José Rizal, además del estudio, en colaboración con Andrea Gallo, Literatura hispanofilipina actual (Premio Juan Andrés); sobre la historia cultural de Filipinas ha publicado el importante volumen en equipo More Hispanic than We Admit. Insight into Philippine Cultural History. José Eugenio Borao es autor de la recopilación en dos volúmenes de las fuentes sobre la presencia española en Taiwán, así como de The Spanish Experience in Taiwan 1626-1642. Joaquín García-Medall ha editado obras de lingüística misionera filipina y es autor de Vocabularios hispano-asiáticos: traducción y contacto intercultural. Mara Fuertes Gutiérrez ha estudiado la obra lingüística de Lorenzo Hervás en relación con su contenido en materia de lenguas asiáticas. Joaquín Sueiro Justel es autor de La enseñanza de idiomas en Filipinas (siglos XVI-XIX), La política lingüística española en América y Filipinas (siglos XVI-XIX) e Historia de la lingüística española en Filipinas (1580-1898). John Lipski es uno de los máximos especialistas actuales en la historia de la variedad lingüística hispánica, pues ha examinado la lengua española a lo largo y ancho del planeta. Heidi Macahilig-Barceló ha colaborado con el Departamento de Educación de Filipinas en la redacción de materiales para la promoción de las lenguas maternas. Florentino Rodao, autor de Franco y el imperio japonés, ha estudiado desde diferentes puntos de vista la presencia española en Asia. Fernando Ziálcita Nakpil, el más importante antropólogo filipino, es autor de Authentic Though not Exotic. Essays on Filipino Identity. Finalmente, Andrea Gallo, el principal dinamizador del estudio crítico de la actual literatura filipina en lengua española es director de la Colección Oriente de literatura hispanofilipina.

For the past two centuries, scholars have debated the origin of Arabic script, the youngest of the Semitic scripts. While one camp pointed to Nabatean as the sure ancestor, another favored Syriac instead. By examining each an­cestor visually and historically, one finds evidence for each point of view. Is it reasonable to insist on a single ancestor for Arabic script? The historical exam­ples of Proto­-Sinaitic and Ugaritic scripts demonstrate that a single script can be shown to have features amalgamated from more than one source. Detailed examination of the features of early Arabic script leads us to conclude that both Nabatean and Syriac strongly influenced its development. Finally, we demonstrate that particular details of cursive linking in Arabic script replicate analogous behavior in Syriac.

Islamic calligraphy, whether written with a reed, painted with a brush, or laid as a mosaic, is of outstanding importance for Islam and for Muslim religious life and experience. Despite the fact that Arabic script conveys fundamental meaning, instant legibility is not at the centre of Islamic calligraphy. Rather, the calligraphy causes problems to the reader, whether learned or lay: It is hard to read. Sometimes it is barely legible. What is the point of a writing that can- not be read?, literary scholar Akane Kawakami asks, alluding to a quote from Roland Barthes. The latter’s answer would most likely be that with illegibility materiality comes to the fore (Kawakami 2011, 388). Materiality is undoubtedly of great importance when thinking about scripts. At least until the dawn of the digital age, writing always happened on something and was done with some- thing.1 Arabic script has a particularly close connection to materiality and things, given its fundamental role in Islamic art and applied writing of various kinds. This philosophical photo essay argues that, even so, the quasi illegibility of writing in Arabic does not shift attention away from what is written, nor does it focus merely on materiality. It holds that the hindered readability is neither a coincidence nor simply a result of artistic playfulness or pure love of fanciful ornamentation. By graphically coding the obvious way of reading, it opens up different forms of legibility, a legibility beyond words. And this would not be possible without one quintessential graphic element that determines Arabic script’s ability to be coded: the line.

This dissertation examines multiple applications of Arabic script and the relationship linking visual design with written communication. It presents typography and calligraphy as distinct communicative practices and explores the importance of print culture and printed material in relation to the rise of the modern bureaucratic state. The work is arranged in seven chapters, each illustrating how changes in the visual appearance of Arabic letters connote distinct channels of textual authority and knowledge. Chapter 1 opens a comparative framework with three models of writing in relation to religious  tradition, and Chapter 2 explores written communication through the lens of grammatology. Chapter 3 delves into the Arabic calligraphic tradition, the symbolic interpretation of letters, and the meanings of multiple scripts. With the arrival of print, Arabic writing practices shifted in response to a new communication technology, and Chapter 4 outlines the Ottoman adoption of print technology. This section examines historical and archival material, which chronicles early Ottoman printing as well as post-print developments of Ottoman calligraphic art. The symbolic, visual, and textual changes that accompanied the new medium are addressed in Chapter 5, and Chapter 6 introduces a comparative study of Arabic letter design in modern Jordan. A series of interviews with practicing calligraphers, graphic designers, and contemporary artists highlight diverse applications of Arabic script and the flexibility of written communication and. Finally, Chapter 7 reflects upon the historical trajectory of previous chapters to ask what the story of Arabic script might teach us about the future of writing. This chapter traces the continuity of calligraphy and digital design and suggests a more nuanced concept of writing for digital practice. As practices of writing continue to shift both in the Middle East and globally, visual conventions surrounding Arabic script provide a wealth of strategies worthy of preservation and exploration.

This paper is part of collection edited by Guillaume Dye that arises from the Nangeroni workshop on early Islam held in 2015. It responds to attempts to situate parts of the Quran into contexts that are more or less informed by Christianity by assessing the evidence of hagiographies written by different Christian confessions. Draft document: Please do not cite without permission, comments welcome.

Des peuples arabes qui ont précédé l'Islam nous connaissons peu de choses. Les historiens arabes les désignent par « les peuples disparus » et les seules sources sur le monde arabe antique restent les récits rapportés par les historiens de la première période de l'Islam. Ces récits sont demeurés souvent sans preuve directe par manque de matériel archéologique. Il a fallu attendre plus de 70 ans, obtenir un corpus épigraphique important et des témoignages archéologiques significatifs, pour qu'on puisse étudier l'histoire ancienne des Arabes directement et non par le biais des civilisations périphériques. Les inscriptions découvertes à la fin du XIXe siècle, dans l'actuelle Arabie Saoudite, enrichies de trouvailles plus récentes, commencent seulement aujourd'hui à être bien comprises. Le corpus épigraphique actuel permet une ébauche de l'histoire sociale, de la langue et des pratiques cultuelles des Arabes durant le millénaire qui a précédé l'Islam. Ces inscriptions sont non seulement importantes pour l'étude de la langue arabe à son origine, mais aussi pour les cultes dont l'Islam a gardé certaines pratiques. Ce livre est une analyse de l'ensemble des inscriptions dédano-liḥyānites connues à ce jour. Elles ont été découvertes sur les stèles provenant des temples antiques ou sur la paroi des montagnes, dans les oasis d'al-ʻUlâ et Madâ'in Sâlih (nord du Hijâz, Arabie Saoudite). Elles remontent à la seconde moitié du Ier millénaire avant l'ère chrétienne. Elles sont qualifiées de dédano-liḥyānites en référence au titre que portent les rois dans les inscriptions, le nom de la montagne Dédan, cité dans les inscriptions, ou le nom ethnique Liḥyān.

The Proto-Indo-European words for the cardinal numbers are believed to be related to fingers, we see some similarities between the first letters of these words in an Indo-European language and the Hindu–Arabic numerals, it seems to be possible that both numerals and letters in different West Asian scripts had an Indo-European origin.

The Sindhī language has been written in numerous scripts throughout its history. However, in the twentieth century, Perso-Arabic and Devanāgarī emerged as the dominant scripts for the language. Today, Perso-Arabic is the sole official script for Sindhī in Pakistan, while both Perso-Arabic and Devanāgarī are in concurrent use for the language in India. This paper identifies and analyses areas of orthographic standardisation and variation in the Perso-Arabic and Devanāgarī scripts for Sindhī , focusing primarily on practices in the Indian context. It first classifies orthographic variation into that stemming from phonological ambiguity, and that which is purely graphematic. The former includes the representation of reduced vowels, gemination, vocalic endings, loanwords, consonant clusters and sounds of unclear phonemic status. The latter includes the shapes and positioning of diacritics, allographs, derivative graphemes and collation orders. The paper concludes by summarising the possible pedagogical implications of such orthographic standardisation and variation.

Modern historians assert that the earliest manuscripts of the Qurʾān were written in an Arabic scriptio defectiva, devoid of orthographic aids such as consonantal diacritics and vowel markers. In fact, the earliest extant manuscripts—those in the Ḥijāzī script, dated to the first/seventh century—do exhibit consonantal diacritics, though only sporadically and insufficiently to create a completely unambiguous text. Previous studies have provided inconclusive results regarding the uses of these spare diacritics and have suggested that scribes may have purposefully excluded them from Qurʾān manuscripts in order to allow different readings of the text to coexist in the same text. Focusing on the few diacritics that do appear in early manuscripts, this paper situates early Qurʾān manuscripts within the context of other Arabic documents of the first/seventh century that exhibit similarly infrequent diacritics. Shared patterns in the usages of diacritics indicate that early Qurʾān manuscripts were produced by scribes relying upon very similar orthographic traditions to those that produced Arabic papyri and inscriptions of the first/seventh century.

This finding aid represent a partial list of Newberry Library holdings related to Arabic script, early printed Arabic, and Middle Eastern printing. The Newberry has quite a few hidden gems in this area, and additional items undoubtedly exist. It is my hope that these notes will help to make these items (both those on this list and those yet to be discovered) more accessible.

Like other Arabic dialects, Moroccan Arabic has no codified spelling standard. Authors who write it in Arabic
script in literary, journalistic or advertising texts employ, often inconsistently, their own rules that may be, generally
speaking, phonetically oriented or follow the model of the orthography of Standard Arabic (fuṣḥā). This paper presents
spelling tendencies identified in a corpus of printed literary works that have not yet been described in previous research. They
concern marking gemination and assimilation, the word-initial ʔalif, the spelling of the hamza, the spelling of the word-final -a in various parts of speech, and marking vowels by means of matres lectionis. The analysis shows that variation in spelling
Moroccan Arabic in Arabic script is strong, some tendencies can, however, be identified.

Arabizi: An Analysis of the Romanization of the Arabic Script from a Sociolinguistic Perspective



Wid H. Allehaiby
King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia




Abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to present a sociolinguistic analysis of the Romanization of the Arabic Script phenomenon better known as Arabizi. Arabizi is a widely used alternative for the Arabic script in computer-mediated contexts (CMC) and social networking sites, which has emerged as a result of the Arabic script being unsupported in technological tools and Internet resources. Arabic speakers have taken different stances to using Arabizi. In this paper, the following issues are discussed: the historical emergence of Arabizi, a thorough explanation of the script, its characters and its features, the social contexts in which users utilize it, and the different attitudes of Arabic speakers towards its use.
Keywords: Arabic Script, Arabizi, Romanization, sociolinguistics, speakers’ attitudes

The main goal of this study was to empirically examine the impact of Arabizi (i.e. writing Arabic with English script) on Palestinian students' Arabic language development. This article seeks to enter the debate over the merits and risks of widespread Arabizi use with a quantitative study of its effects on Arab students. In order to assess whether internet use and Arabizi use affect performance in Arabic fluency, we administered an Arabic spelling test, followed by a brief survey assessing students' use of Arabizi to 420 eighth grade students in Bethlehem government schools. The overall results show that using Arabizi was correlated with weaker scores on the spelling test, indicating either that Arabizi use harms students Arabic capabilities or that other factors cause students to use Arabizi and to have weak Arabic spelling skills. However, more research must be done to tease out these differences and look beyond correlation.

Continuing the dialogue between ‘comparative standardology’ and variation studies, this volume offers comparative data which allows us to delineate large groups of factors behind the standardisation process in manuscript cultures. The discussion in this chapter draws on the assumption that standardisation can be understood better if it is considered a non-unidirectional process. The groups of factors can thus be seen as channels or pathways of (de)standardisation. A comparative analysis of such pathways in the twelve manuscript cultures addressed in this volume permits us to postulate some generalisations, as follows.
Contact situations do not necessarily lead to the exchange of standardised orthographic principles. In many cultures, the co-existence of Standard Arabic and non-standardised languages spoken and written in Muslim communities poses a paradox: such languages are profoundly influenced by Arabic, but their orthographies are not modelled on the principle of standardisation. This apparent paradox is resolved by the prediction that standards in orthography – one of the domains of manuscript culture – are conceptually different from standards in other domains, such as format, layout and script. As there is a difference between the standardisation of spoken language and written language, there is also a difference between the standardisation of orthography and other domains of manuscript production. Thus, a general tendency observable at the level of physical features of manuscript production is that layout and script types tend to be unified, irrespective of orthographic norms and, vice versa, orthographic norms develop irrespective of norms applied to physical domains of manuscript production.

Se aborda el estudio de la placa de madera de cedro, con escritura árabe en el frente y en el reverso, que apareció en la gruta de Lapa (Sesimbra) el 4 de mayo de 2009. Se presenta la lectura y la traducción completas de los renglones conservados y su análisis caligráfico y textual. A partir de ese análisis y del contexto arqueológico en que tuvo lugar el hallazgo, se plantea una serie de aproximaciones a la cronología de la tabla y al sentido de su ocultación.  Con ese objetivo se analiza la función primordial que este tipo de objetos cumplía en la dār al-islām y se plantean otros posibles usos añadidos en determinados contextos históricos, al igual que ocurre con otros objetos a los que se les ha adjudicado la misma función. Por último, se enmarcan y relacionan las manifestaciones gráficas de estos objetos con las proporcionadas por el registro epigráfico de la misma cronología.

The most important part of book printing art is typography. Top of page was decorated with convolution headpiece named Unvan, which was taken from script books. Unvan is a headpiece, a part of composition of a page, but not a separate graphic picture, represents an escutcheon, often rimmed at the top by cuspate arc in the shape of cupola culminating in decorative element named Madokhil. Typographic ornament, being at the same time the universal mean of architectonical building of the book, gave special features to publications. One of the most interesting things concerning this field is the appearance of initials in books printed in Arabic type nonrelevant before. For the first time samples of colored letters decorated with framings were performed. This was a unique event in Arabic typography in Russia, when the initial began play a matchable role in printed publications of the region. Printed Shamails are the part of Typographical Art. We succeed to find out the unique sample of typesetting Shamail of 1891, which is worthy of admiration for it shows the mastery of typesetter and printer from the University typography. In the early 20 th century masters influenced by new typographic art used the typesetting ornaments of the old typographic style infrequent. The new style displaced the statistical forms of the ornaments associable with survival of times past. The typographical art transformed under the stimulus of advanced one, as result expressive and functional cubism and suprematism methods developed.

The Arabic script community has formed the Task Force on Arabic Script IDNs (TF-AIDN), also acting as the Arabic script Generation Panel (GP), which in turn has developed a Proposal for the Arabic Script Root Zone Label Generation Rules (Proposal [XML, 29 KB] and Proposal Documentation [PDF, 2.35 MB]). As per the LGR Procedure [PDF, 772 KB], this proposal is being posted for public comments to allow those who have not participated in the Arabic script GP to make their views known to the Generation Panel so it can finalize the proposal for integration into the Label Generation Rules for the Root Zone.

Taught from primary school to the university level – where new courses on the globalization of the Arabic writing system have cropped up (Abdallah 2014) – the Arabic script, with all its orthographic peculiarities and multiple facets, continues to shape languages other than Arabic, their communities and specific textual traditions. However, comparative research on the Arabic script as used to write langauges other than Arabic, as well as broader topics such as digraphia and allography, are still rather scarce. This holds particularly true for Africa. One interesting exception is the book The Arabic Script in Africa. The first part of this article is dedicated to situating this book within the wider context of studies on digraphia, allography and specific local adaptations of the Arabic writing systems, while also pointing out the necessity for further research; the second part discusses the case studies presented in this book and their implications.

The relationship between space, language, and the active construction of political identity in Lebanon is explored through a diachronic look at the outdoor display of political rhetoric of the Lebanese political leader, General Michel Aoun, and his evolving party, the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), in the public landscape of Beirut. Specifically, I will focus on graffiti of the FPM in 2005 and discuss its resonances with the earlier political rhetoric of Aoun during the civil war and his Paris exile, at a time when he was in a conflicted relationship with the state. I will then look at his later political advertising campaigns from 2008–2009 to see how some semiotic elements from Aoun's time in exile and his return in 2005 have been extended into the more recently professionally polished party image. Through the examination of linguistic strategies, such as the use of reported speech and graffiti font, I argue that these textual artifacts contain the residue of contested ideologies of populism, nationhood, and belonging, which gain particular meaning when placed in specific geo-semiotic zones within the political landscape of the city. These ideologies formed the basis for constructing a graphic identity for Aoun in subsequent advertising campaigns. The publicly placed written word, then, provides a medium through which political identity is formed, negotiated, and revised.

This paper examines Islamic calligraphy as a method of Qur'anic recitation. Calligraphy performs the Divine as a flowering in space, much as oral recitation performs the Divine as a flowering in time. Theoretically, the paper applies Heidegger's discussion of technology as a process of revealing to the traditional Islamic notions of  zahir (the apparent) and batin (the hidden). As a technology, calligraphy reveals the depth of batin through the zahir of written form. This  revelation occurs as calligraphic inscription is simultaneous  evaluated as linguistic  message, aesthetic  form, and iconic image. By way of reference, three images of  the bismillah are discussed as practices of visual recitation. Employing the same verse  for each figure displays the flexibility of calligraphy and its ability to reveal numerous hidden meanings within a single text.

With advances in machine learning techniques, handwriting recognition systems have gained a great deal of importance. Lately, the increasing popularity of handheld computers, digital notebooks, and smartphones give the field of online handwriting recognition more interest. In this paper, we propose an enhanced method for the recognition of Arabic handwriting words using a directions-based segmentation technique and discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients as structural features. The main contribution of this research was combining a total of 18 structural features which were extracted by DCT coefficients and using the k-nearest neighbors (KNN) classifier to classify the segmented characters based on the extracted features. A dataset is used to validate the proposed method consisting of 2500 words in total. The obtained average 99.10% accuracy in recognition of handwritten characters shows that the proposed approach, through its multiple phases, is efficient in separating, distinguishing, and classifying Arabic handwritten characters using the KNN classifier. The availability of an online dataset of Arabic handwriting words is the main issue in this field. However, the dataset used will be available for research via the website.

Description

Now learning non-Roman-alphabet languages is as easy as A-B-C!

Read and Write Arabic Script will help you read and write simple Arabic. This book is a step-by-step introduction to the script that will enable you to read Arabic signs, notices, advertisements and headlines.

Even if you think learning the script is a daunting prospect, this book will make it simple. The alphabet is introduced in stages and there’s lots of practice of each new character before the next one is introduced. There are plenty of example words and phrases that are seen everywhere in any Arabic-speaking environment so you can familiarize yourself with the most common signs and directions.

By the end of the book, you will be reading and writing simple Arabic with confidence and be prepared for your next trip to the Middle East or further study of the language.

Features:

One, five and ten-minute introductions to key principles to get you started Author insights for lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the author’s many years of experience Useful vocabulary, easy to find and learn, to build a solid foundation for speaking Extra online articles at teachyourself.com to give a richer understanding of the Arabic-speaking culture

This intensive course will introduce participants to working with manuscript materials produced by mudéjares and Moriscos in aljamiado (texts written in Castilian or Romance language using Arabic characters) from the late-fifteenth to early-seventeenth centuries. Over the course of five days participants will be given an introduction to aljamiado literature, as well as training in reading original texts (working from reproductions of actual manuscripts).

One of the basic issues in studying the History of Quran, is the script that was used in the Arabia and Arab territories. Discovering the origin and chronology of the developments of this script is considered important in understanding the accessibility of Muslims to proper styles of writing in order to record their holy scripture. The Islamic traditions on the issue constitute of inconsistent and isolated narrations and views. According to these reports Muslim scholars and orientalists have suggested variant hypotheses on the origin and development of the Arabic script. On the other hand in the recent decades with the rise of discovery of material evidence in Arabia and Arab region, paleographers have reached definite conclusions on the beforementioned subject. Among these achievements is the origination of the Arabic script from the Nabatean script, showing that this script has evolved during a period of several hundred years, as well as the fact that the scripture was used 200 years before Islam in different northern areas. The comparative study of the Islamic reports and material evidence, thus, reveals the defects of the reports, in addition to criticizing the alternative theories of Syriac or Southern origins for the Arabic script, lack of proper script for writing in the newly established Islamic nation of Hijaz, as well as the possibility of writing the Quran in other scripts.

This Palaeographical Guide to a Draft Copy (musawwada) of Sahl b. al-Faḍl al-Tustarī’s Torah Commentary gives the transcriptions (Hebrew in Arabic script) of verses Ex 34:18 – Lev 3:4 as found in ms. SP, RNL, Arab.-Yevr. 21, fols. 105r-213v (https://tinyurl.com/Arab-Ebr-21). It grew out of a workshop (“A Jewish Theologian’s Arabic Guide to State Administration: Mukhtaṣar fī ṣināʿat al-kitāba of Sahl b. al-Faḍl al-Tustarī”), organised by Dr. Luke Yarbrough at the NYU Abu Dhabi, 29-30 March 2017. Comments and corrections are welcome (g.schwarb@gmail.com).

This article presents the development of an Arabic online handwriting recognition system. To develop our system, we have chosen the neural network approach. It offers solutions for most of the difficulties linked to Arabic script recognition. We test the approach with our collected databases. This system shows a good result and it has a high accuracy (98.50% for characters, 96.90% for words).

This paper is the third part of the three part`s study presenting recommendations for the transcription of Arabic texts into Latin script in Slovak scientificmainly linguistic works, based on the author`s own experience. When transcribing Arabic words into a different sign system for the purposes of such works, one often considers it useful that their transcribed forms be accompanied by the original ones. In most Arabic texts, orthographic and orthoepic signs are usually not written. The system of partial vocalization of Arabic texts suggested here (for the cases where it is needed or helpful) was mainly inspired by the author`s own experience with the problems stemming from a lack of such a system, which would (and hopefully will) enhance the work of an editor, linguist, as well as that of a teacher of Arabic concerning its written form.