Selam Alaykum my dear friends , how are you :D hope that you are fine and enjoying your summer vacation :D my story with this article began when I was scrolling on Facebook news feed and I found a text written in Arabic , but this time without dots O.o as the picture shows ,so after I asked uncle Google :D in addition to some friends who are studying in major of Arabic literature, I manage to get an idea about the topic
The History :
According to history,first attempts to put dots upon letters began in Abbasid dynasty,this Epoque was a change point for Arabic language ,a linguist/poet and a grammarian called Abu al-Aswad al Du'ali (603 - 688), was the first to make a letter pointing system in Arabic (664 AD) , after he noticed that many people who converted to Islam could not read the holy Qur'an properly and so could not figure out what it's said in the book .
Thanks to his pointing system , people became able to understand the meaning of words without being dependent on the context , and the sentence like the one above became easier to figure out and makes sense "it was said that an elephant killed an elephant before sunrise" :D
However , there was a problem concerning some words that have similar spelling , but still, have different meanings , so there was a need to make something which could help people to read words correctly .The solution will come 100 years later with a lexicographer called Al Khalil (also known as Al-Farahidi ) who invented Arabic diacritics as we know today :) what makes Farahidi's system better than the previous Du-ali's system , is that it includes all vowels and it's used for all syllables in the word , unlike Du'ali who used points just in the beginning and the end of the word , which is useful in case of some strict texts that requires the correct pronunciation like religious texts for example :) .
Finally , hope this post help you to have an idea about the evolution of Arabic , and hope to see you soon :) , until then , if you like this topic and you want to know more about it , here are some links that you can visit (they are not my websites , but their content worth sharing ^^ ) , see you soon :D
LINKS :
- http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/Text/Mss/vowel.html
- http://us12.campaign-archive2.com/?u=bf722f166356df705fcff05cd&id=51315f40bf
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Arabic_alphabet
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