Other Characters
The following are not actual letters but different orthographical shapes for letters, and in the case of the lām alef, a ligature. As to ﺀ hamze, it has only a single graphic, since it is never tied to a preceding or following letter. However, it is sometimes 'seated' on a vāv, ye or alef, and in that case the seat behaves like an ordinary vāv, ye or alef respectively. Technically, hamze is not a letter but a diacritic.
| Name | Transliteration | IPA | Final | Medial | Initial | Stand-alone |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| alef madde | ā | ﺂ | — | — | ﺁ | |
| he ye | -eye or -eyeh | ﮥ | — | — | ۀ | |
| lām alef | lā | ﻼ | — | — | ﻻ | |
| tanvin nasb | -an | ـاً | — | — | اً |
Although at first glance they may seem similar, there are many differences in the way the different languages use the alphabets. For example, similar words are written differently in Persian and Arabic, as they are used differently.
The Persian alphabet adds four letters to the Arabic alphabet, (ch in chair), (s in measure):
| Sound | Shape | Unicode name |
|---|---|---|
| پ | pe | |
| (ch) | چ | che |
| (zh) | ژ | zhe |
| گ | gaf |
Read more about this topic: Persian Alphabet
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of human history.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)