Joining Letters

Most Arabic letters have a tail at the end. This tail disappears when the letter is followed by any other letter (i.e., when the letter is not the last letter in a word). See:

Taking the dots into account, there are nineteen letters that lose their tails:

ب ت ث ج ح خ س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ل م ن

These nineteen letters and the six Non-joining Letters cover most of the alphabet. The remaining three letters are kaaf كاف ك, haa# هاء ه and yaa# ياء ي.

To get a feel for all this letter morphing, play around a bit with the Arabic-o-matic. Just type some letters randomly into it and erase them again, one by one, with the "backspace" key.

Copyright (c) 2001-2009 Jordi Mas Trullenque.
email: jordimastrullenque at gmail dot com
http://purl.oclc.org/net/arabe/pierdecola.en.html
Last revised: 2008-04-01

letters with four shapes

Drawing the Letters

writing_arabic -> Joining Letters