ORIGIN OF ARABIC :
Spoken by over 100 million people, Arabic is the most important language of
the Semitic group (Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic). The Arabic writing system has an
alphabet of 28 consonants, which developed from the Canaanite script through Nabatean
(from which the later square Hebrew letters are also derived). The similarities between
the Hebrew script and the Arabic script are not a coincidence; the Hebrew script came
from the Canaanites, the people Prophet Musa (Moses) delivered from Egypt by the will
of Alah Ta’alah. These people later emigrated towards the Middle East.
It is interesting to know that the various Canaanite scripts evolved from cursive version
of Egyptian hieroglyphs (demonic script).
See, the old Semitic Writing Systems below:
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Canaanites, who were enslaved by the Egyptians c.1700 BCE spoke a West-
Semitic language. While enslaved, the Canaanites became interested in the Egyptian
hieroglyphs, and gradually adopted some of the hieroglyphs to form a phonetic script for
their own language. Egyptian hieroglyphs constituted a system that included
pictographs, ideographs, as well as phonetic characters. The West Semitic slaves
focused on the phonetic characters, and carried over into their system the Egyptian
practice of representing only the consonant, not the vowels, in the phonetic characters.
The new phonetic script used only single-consonant characters, and developed an
optional diacritical system for specifying the elided vowels in the written words.
Egyptian was unrelated to the language of the slaves, but the hieroglyphs adopted and
adapted this way spelled the Canaanite language, related to Phoenician and Hebrew.
The Arabic writing system was introduced into Mecca not long before the
Revelation of the Qur’an. It was refined and gained later its vowel strokes to facilitate its
reading.
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