Arabic Alphabet Evolution Quiz

The Arabic alphabet evolved from the Nabataean or Syriac alphabets. The first recorded text in the Arabic alphabet was written in 512 and only had 21 letters. The Nabataean alphabet was designed to write 22 phonemes, but Arabic has 28 consonant phonemes. As cursive Nabataean writing evolved into Arabic writing, the writing became largely joined-up, producing more ambiguities. In the 7th century, dots were added to the Arabic alphabet to make enough different letters for Classical Arabic's 28 phonemes. The alphabet then had 28 letters, and so could be used to write numbers. Later, vowel signs and hamzas were added. Some features of the Arabic alphabet arose because of differences between Qur'anic spelling and the form of Classical Arabic that was standardized later. The old alphabetical order is known as the Levantine or Abjadi order. When the Arabic alphabet spread to countries that used other languages, extra letters had to be invented to spell non-Arabic sounds. Since the early 20th century, many non-Arab Islamic areas began using the Cyrillic or Latin alphabet, and local adaptations of the Arabic alphabet were abandoned.