ARABIC LANGUAGE CHARACTERISTICS

Arabic, is one of the seven official languages of the United Nations and it is t
he mother tongue of 250 million people. The nature and structure of the Arabic w
ords is highly derivative and inflective. Moreover, Arabic words are often compo
und structures, which
should syntactically be regarded as phrases rather than single words [3]. Unlike
Latin-based alphabets, the orientation of writing in Arabic is from right-to-le
ft, thus making Arabic writing differs distinctly from any other languages like
English, Spanish, etc. Although, there are common features that characterize su
ch writing .
These features can only be summarized by the
followings:
**Writing is directed from Right to Left.
**Character used are 28 in addition to special one called ( ) like in ( –"hwaa" which
means Eve).
**Characters within their words are often connected thus excluding some of them
, which are connected to their predecessors. Those characters are
.
**Character may take more than one shape in accordance to its location in its in
volving word. This might be at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a w
ord. Such variation extends Arabic characters into 57 shapes.
The Arabic word can be divided into three types, Noun, Verb and Particle.
Noun: is a word that describes a person or thing. Like "mdrst" which means schoo
l.
VERB: is a word, which describes an action, and it takes three forms (past, pres
ent, and imperative).
Particle: is a word, which preceded or succeeded by a Noun or a Verb such as pre
positions, adverse, interjections, and conjunctions