Who I am · my language28 letters · 1 alphabet
العَرَبِيَّة
Arab
My family’s language, and the one I heard before I heard English. Twenty-eight letters, each with a different shape depending on where it stands, written right to left, joined up by default, and with the vowels usually left off entirely because you are expected to already know the word.
It is also, structurally, the most elegant language I know. Almost every word in it is three consonants poured into a pattern, so a whole family of meanings shares a visible skeleton, and both blocks below are there to show you that rather than tell you about it.
The Alphabetالأبجدية
All twenty-eight, and every shape each one takes. A letter is drawn differently depending on whether it starts a word, sits in the middle of one, ends one, or stands alone, and that is not handwriting, it is the alphabet itself. Six of them (ا د ذ ر ز و) never join to whatever comes after them, so they have no start or middle shape at all and every word containing one visibly breaks apart around it. Those six are the dashed tiles.
The Root Systemالجذر
Pick three consonants. Every word below is those same three letters poured into a different mould, and the English column looks like six unrelated words while the Arabic column is visibly one. This is why an Arabic dictionary is ordered by root rather than by spelling, and why you can meet a word you have never seen and still know roughly what it means.