The Iranian Student said:

>I am not placing farsi words in Arabic script ;-) What you
>see in genuine Persian alphabet which we gave to arabs
>1400 years ago.
>
>Actually before arabs invaded Iran, there was not a real
>alphabet and grammatic for arabian language. The written
>alphabet before in arabian peninsula as far as i know was
>"Kufi" alphabet....

I'm going to stick my neck out and argue with someone about their native tongue (normally a stupid thing to do). I know a tiny bit about Arabic having studied it for two years in unversity (and forgotten almost all of it). My Arabic teacher was a very interesting woman who was a Sephardic jew born in Baghdad (Arabic was her first language). Baghdad once had a significant (and ancient) Jewish community that became extinct after Saddam. Her family moved to Iran after fleeing Baghdad and she eventually ended up in America.

Arabic like Hebrew are Semitic languages. Farsi is an Indo-European language like English, French and Greek. Arabic is a "classical" language and (unlike English) has a very logical structure with an interlocking grammer. As is typical of a Semitic language, Arabic is based upon triliteral verbs. For example the word: "to teach" in Arabic is "darasa". However in common place writings only the consonents "drs" would appear without the small vowels being written. Notice this word has only three letters which is why it is called a triliteral verb. It's easy for an Arab to drop the small vowels because they appear as diacritical marks (little accent marks that appear above and below the main script). Hebrew is also based upon triliteral verbs and uses diacritical marks. The trilteral verb typically acts as a stem for a variety of derivative words, e.g. "mudarris" = teacher, "madrasa" = school (actually religious school). Notice that "drs" was the core of these other words. Typically a non-Semitic language has too many vowels in it and lacks the interlocking logic of a Semitic language. This makes the use of a Semitic alphabet without the diacritical marks inappropriate for use with an Indo-European language. For example, the Turkish language may have the most vowels of any language currently spoken. As good Moslems, the Turks originally wrote their language in Arabic script. Unfortunately for the Turks, the confused mish-mash the resulted was almost incomprehensible. One of the first thngs that Ataturk did after he setup the Turkish Republic was abandon the Arabic alphabet and adopt a special version of the Roman Alphabet that included lots of omlauts for the Turkish vowels. To some extent, the Iranian's use of the Arabic alphabet has simlar issues. As the Iranian student mentioned, there are several sounds in Farsi for which there is no original Arabic alphabetic letter. The Persians had to invent new alphabet letters when they adopted the Arabic alphabet. When I was learning Arabic, I had to use the Persian letter for "G" when I wrote down my name (there is no "G" in Arabic).

Sometime in the distant future, after the Iranians have sorted out all of their other problems, they'll probably abandon the Arabic alphabet as the Turks did and go over to the Roman alphabet or something better. I personally find the flowing Arabic script more visually attractive than our Roman alphabet. Unfortunately Arab script is not very practical for a modern printed Indo-European language.

Gary