Arabic shorthand -- combining mim and jim with other letters.

March 2, 2009 1:07 PM

Basic Arabic help with mim, jim, haa, etc. combined with other letters at the beginning of words.

I've somehow managed to not commit this to memory and now it's giving me fits. Can someone please point me to a quick guide of how these letters combine in shorthand at the beginnings of words? A classic example is the shorthand version of محمد where the first three letters combine. I'm not asking about the basic initial position writing of these words.

posted by proj to writing & language (6 comments total)

The word you're looking for is ligatures. There's a unicode test page here for Arabic ligatures...it might help.
posted by asras at 2:25 PM on March 2 [1 favorite has favorites]

oops...can't link directly...on the second link, click Arabic under Unicode test page on the menu on the left side of the page. There should be two AAs in the center of the page that both link to ligature guides.
posted by asras at 2:32 PM on March 2

Fantastic, thanks!
posted by proj at 2:40 PM on March 2

Hmmm, this is close but not exactly what I'm looking for. I guess I am actually looking for these ligatures, but also when the letters are preceded by lam. But you have given me a good starting point.
posted by proj at 2:45 PM on March 2

Do you mean a Muhammad written like this?

There's a quick chart of MSA joins here.

But it sounds like you're looking for neither calligraphy or "newsprint" but rather everyday shorthand. My very limited experience is that there isn't any one shorthand and that people's shorthand varies a whole lot between regions and individuals. Sin and shin can become long shallow arcs without teeth, terminal nun becomes like a spiral with the end of the spiral where the dot should be, mim becomes a backward-loop. One instructor I had wrote double and triple dots as horizontal lines and carats respectively. Another instructor I had hated that and told me not to do it. If you're learning arabic as a second language, I don't see why you wouldn't just aim to develop good MSA script.
posted by BinGregory at 7:08 PM on March 2

I wrote out a bunch of words that had خ, ح, ج, and م in them, both alone and with an initial ال. And محمد is in there too, a few lines down. You can see them all here (low-quality photo, since I don't have a scanner). Basically, you "stack" the ج/ح/خ on top of each other, and the م gets sort of tucked in there too.

If you want more detail on the ruq'a script (the one most people use for everyday Arabic handwriting, as opposed to naskh, which is like printing), T.F. Mitchell's Writing Arabic: A Practical Introduction to Ruq'ah Script should help, although it might be hard to find. Evidently it's available for $75 (!) on Amazon.com, but you might find it at your local university library.

Let me know if you have any further questions, and I'll try to help!
posted by gg at 7:13 PM on March 2