Essay On Arabic Letters

Recognizing Arabic letters involves joining letters instead of grouping them together like the method used in English alphabet. However, in order to recognize the letters there is a certain rule that needs to be considered such as the changes on how the letters are written depending on the combinations used. In addition, the most distinct and recognizable characteristic of the Arabic letter is that it never uses capitalization. The cursive nature of Arabic letters essentially makes no difference on how it was written by hand or in print, which encompasses a learning objective of recognition. Recognizing Arabic letters is not as simple as looking up French-English word in a dictionary because Arabic words are listed according to their “root” words. The rule here is that the words in Arabic are constructed from a “root” consists of three consonants. The root contains the underlying idea like for example, the consonants k-t-b are used to convey the idea of writing. Added with vowels such as “a” to “u” the consonants will then describe a different word. For instance, if k-t-b is to be added with “a” in between the consonants, the word is then changed into the verb form of the word writing (katab = write).
The important idea here is that the three consonants will constitute the same idea as long as the letters remain in its position and order. If a person is looking at an Arabic dictionary, the best method is to look for the root and then compare them with the different variations of the word with the corresponding meaning. Another important characteristic of Arabic is that the texts are read from left to right and for beginners it would be helpful to recognize the letters by reading Arabic words in the same manner. When it comes to recognizing Arabic vowels, it is useful to consider that the short vowels and the three long vowels are to be pronounced together with a consonant since Arabic does not use consonants consecutively. Therefore, when reading the word and found that it contains two consecutive consonants, the second consonant is pronounced as a vowel.