The following notes are intended to provide some guidance for copy-editors unfamiliar with Arabic who have to deal with it in a typescript, whether in Arabic script or in transliterated form.

Arabic script, no matter whether it is handwritten or typeset, is a cursive one, written from right to left. Only consonants and long vowels are normally shown in the script; there are orthographic signs to represent the short vowels (see below), but they are not usually shown except in the Koran, school books, and old or difficult texts (script in which the short vowels do appear is referred to as ‘vocalized’). There are no capital letters.

The table on p. 471 shows the twenty-eight letters in their traditional order, with their names, their various forms, and their transliteration according to two different systems: (1) a commonly used one and (2) the British Standard system (BS 4280: Transliteration of Arabic Characters). It will be seen from the table that there are two classes of letters:

those which can be connected both to a preceding and to a following letter; they have four possible forms

those which can be joined only to a preceding letter; they have only two possible forms.