User:40bus/Finnish scripts/Arabic

The Arabic script is one of the most widely adopted writing systems in the world, together with Latin and Cyrillic. Its main distinctive characteristics are that letters are written right-to-left, and letterforms merge with each other in a cursive manner.

Adaptation process
Most consonant letters were fairly straightforward: ف = /f/, ر = /r/, etc. Still, some changes had to be made due to the different consonants – ط, ص and their dotted variants were excluded as their sounds did not exist in Finnish. Additional letters were also added: ژ /ʒ/ and گ /g/ come from the Perso-Arabic variant, while ڤ /p/ comes from the variety of Arabic script used to write Malay, called Jawi.

Jawi also uses the letters ڠ to write /ŋ/ and چ to write /tʃ/. It would be simply easier to write /ŋ/ as ع (/ʕ/ in Arabic) and /tʃ/ as ح (/ħ/ in Arabic), without the 3 dots.

Another issue I faced was the vowels. Classical Arabic only distinguishes the 3 vowel qualities /a/, /i/ and /u/, which is reflected in the writing system. To fix this, I took advantage of the fact that Arabic script also has diacritical vowel markings for َ /a/, ِ /i/ and ُ /u/, and re-assigned them to represent /ø/, /e/ and /o/ respectably – the traditional ا /a/, ي /i/, و /u/ is then mapped to Finnish /ɑ/, /i/ and /u/. Another source of additional vowels were the ‘nunation’ vowels ً /an/ and ٌ /un/ – these were re-assigned to /æ/ and /y/. And finally, the long vowels were assigned to be written as doubling of the vowel symbol.