Writing Arabic

target: ar — Arabic, العربية, in the Arabic script, written right to left. Everything that holds for Persian holds for Arabic, with its own face and its own transliteration.

1. How its text is found#

Arabic needs no mark. Every stretch of the Arabic script in the prose is an Arabic run — its vowel marks (fatha, kasra, damma, sukun, shadda, tanwin, the dagger alif) included, since they are part of the script. Words parted by single spaces stay one run; the Arabic digits ٠–٩ and the marks ، ؛ ؟ belong to it; a Latin letter, a western digit or Latin punctuation ends it.

---target: ar---The word كِتَابٌ *kitābun* means a book, and مَدْرَسَة *madrasa* a school.العِلْمُ نُورٌذهبتُ إلى المدرسة صباحًا، ثم عدتُ إلى البيت.[أرسلتُ ملف PDF إلى المعلّم.]{tl}

• A paragraph of nothing but Arabic letters, marks, spaces and Arabic punctuation is a display line, set larger.
• A paragraph with no Latin letter is an Arabic paragraph, right to left.
• An Arabic sentence that holds a Latin word or western digits is marked […]{tl}, or […]{ar}: the same mark.

2. Faces and direction#

Arabic is set in Noto Naskh Arabic, which comes with the toolbox, with Vazirmatn behind it on the screen; on paper in Noto Naskh Arabic, with Amiri and Vazirmatn as fallbacks. It has no second face (font= is ignored) and cannot be set vertically. Its text is set 1.52 times the size of the prose. Noto Naskh Arabic has no Latin letters, so on paper a Latin word inside a marked stretch is set in the face of the text round it.

As with Persian, right to left is the browser’s work on the screen and TeX’s on paper, where every build reads the Arabic back off the page to check its order.

---target: ar---[قِفا نَبْكِ مِنْ ذِكْرى حَبيبٍ ومَنْزِلِ ⏎بِسِقْطِ اللِّوى بَيْنَ الدَّخولِ فَحَوْمَلِ]{tl bg=sand}

3. Punctuation#

The Arabic comma, semicolon and question mark belong inside an Arabic sentence of its own. Between Arabic words that stand in the prose, use the prose’s punctuation: an Arabic comma next to an Arabic word is taken into its run.

4. Vocabulary entries#

Three parts after the headword: transliteration, origin, meaning.

---target: ar---## كِتَاب | kitāb | root k-t-b, *writing* | = *book*

5. Transliteration#

A consistent scholarly transliteration of what is said — Modern Standard Arabic as written, a dialect form as heard — the same in every document whatever the prose is written in:

• long vowels ā ī ū, short a i u, the diphthongs aw and ay;
• hamza ʾ (never at the start of a word: amal), ʿayn ʿ;
• the emphatics with a dot under them, ṣ ḍ ṭ ẓ; ḥ = ح, ḏ = ذ, ṯ = ث, ġ = غ, q = ق, š = ش, j = ج; ḫ = خ, always one letter, never kh;
• tā marbūṭa -a in pause (madīna), -at where it is read (madīnat al-malik);
• the article al-, assimilated as heard before a sun letter: aš-šams, ar-rajul, but al-qamar;
• clitics hyphenated: wa-, fa-, bi-, li-, ka-, sa-, and the pronoun suffixes -hu -hā -ka -ki -ī -nā -kum -hum;
• doubled consonants written double: muʿallim.

---target: ar---[الشَّمْس]{translit:aš-šams} *the sun*, [مُعَلِّم]{teal translit:muʿallim} *teacher*.

Arabic has no reading: kana: means nothing in an Arabic document.