The Shwa Alphabet for Arabic

Contents

The use of Shwa script to write Arabic has several advantages over the traditional script (in addition to its universality). Most visible is the lack of dots: each letter has its own form. There is a full letter for hamza, a letter for the specail lam used in the name Allah, and many of the special signs needed to make up for the deficiencies of traditional script, e.g. sukūn , madda and waṣla, are simply not needed at all: Shwa script is much cleaner.

The term Standard Arabic includes both the Classical Arabic of the Qur'ān and Golden Age, and Modern Standard Arabic (the language people are taught to read and write in schools), but nobody speaks it as a native language. In contrast, the vernacular spoken dialects, which differ considerably from one another, are rarely written. But it is not the role of the script to favor one or the other: Shwa script can be used to write any of them. What that means is that the dialects of Arabic, including Classical and Modern Standard, differ as much from each other when written in the Shwa script as they already do in speech.

Unlike the traditional script, Shwa script for Arabic is written from left to right. Otherwise, a straight one-for- one replacement of traditional letters by their Shwa equivalents is a good first step in transliteration. Here's a table of equivalents (I use the apostrophe ' to represent hamza, the exclamation mark ! to represent !ayn, and the underdot to represent other emphatic consonants) :

Traditional	Name	IPA	English	Shwa
ا	'alif	aː	ā
أ	(as chair)	ʔ	'
ب	bā'	b	b
ت	tā'	t	t
ث	thā'	θ	th
ج	djīm	ʤ	dj
	(in Miṣr)	g	g
	(in ash-Shām or al-Maghrib)	ʒ	zh
ح	ḥē'	ħ	ḥ
خ	khā'	x	kh
د	dāl	d	d
ذ	dhāl	ð	dh
ر	rā'	r	rr
ز	zāy	z	z
س	sīn	s	s
ش	shīn	ʃ	sh
ص	ṣād	sˁ	ṣ	=
ض	ḍād	dˁ	ḍ	=
ط	ṭā'	tˁ	ṭ	=
ظ	dḥā'	ðˁ	ḍh	=
	ẓā'	zˁ	ẓ	=
ع	!ayn	ʕ	!
غ	ghayn	ɣ	gh
ف	fā'	f	f
ق	qāf	q	q	=
ك	kāf	k	k
ل	lām	l	l
	in Allah	lˁ	ll	=
م	mīm	m	m
ن	nūn	n	n
ه	hā'	h	h
و	wāw	w	w
و	(as vowel)	uː	ū
اَوْ	(diphthong)	oː	ō
ي	yā'	j	y
ي	(as vowel)	iː	ī
اَيْ	(diphthong)	eː	ē
other signs
ء	hamza	ʔ	'
اَ	fatḥa	a	a
اُ	ḍamma	u	u
اِ	kasra	i	i
اّ	shadda	ː	(double)
اْ	sukūn	(no vowel)
آ	madda	'ā
ٱ	waṣla	aː	ā
اً	(nunation)	-n	-n
ة	tā' marbūṭa	a(t)		()

Notes:

• Arabic in Shwa uses the cursive Abjad gait in which the consonants of a word are attached, while the vowels are written in between them.
• Unlike in the traditional script, short vowels (َ fatḥa, ُ ḍamma and ِ kasra) are always written, and in fact vary their shapes to show the pronunciation.
• Geminate (double) consonants are written using the Long mark, which nicely corresponds to the shadda. Long vowels are also written with the Long mark, which replaces the consonant (but not before another vowel).
• Shwa considers that the diphthongs ay and aw have become long vowels ey and ow.
• The ْ sukūn isn't needed.
• There is no ٱ waṣla. If the initial hamza of the article is not pronounced, it simply isn't written. Since the Shwa hamza doesn't need a "chair", there is no confusion.
• There is no ى 'alif maqsūra. When a final ā is pronounced short, it's simply written as a.
• There is no ة tā' marbūṭa . Normally, the feminine ending is just written as a fatḥa, but when it's followed by a vowel, Shwa just adds a ط tā'.
• Unlike in the traditional script, when the pronunciation of the definite article أَل 'al changes, either because it's followed by a "sun letter" or because it's preceded by a vowel, the written form follows the pronunciation.
• The indefinite article is the suffix -n, but in traditional script, it is usually represented (if at all) by a doubling of the short vowel sign (e.g. هً) and the addition of a silent 'alif in the accusative case. In Shwa, we just use the letter n for this nunation.
• As shown in the table above, the pronunciation of the letter ج djim differs across the Arabic-speaking world. Everywhere, it should be written as it is pronounced, whether that is as dj, g or zh. The same is true for the many other variations in pronunciation: every dialect is written as it is pronounced, including the standard dialect.
• If a short vowel is not pronounced at the end of the word (because of waqf), it's not written in Shwa.
• In Arabic, the stress always falls on the penult (the second syllable from the end), unless the penult has only a short vowel and no final consonant, in which case the stress falls on the syllable before, the antepenult. In the Abjad gait, stressed vowels are written high (above the cursive line), and unstressed vowels low (below it).

Emphasis

Five consonants are considered emphatic : ṣ ḍ ṭ dḥ/ẓ and q . These sounds feature secondary pharyngealization : the root of your tongue is retracted as they are spoken. This retraction spreads to neighboring sounds in the same word, especially vowels. The letter lam has a special emphatic pronunciation in the word Allah (and Shwa has an emphatic ḷ letter for this sound), but it doesn't affect the neighboring sounds. In contrast, the letter rā', while it doesn't feature the secondary pharyngealization of the others, has the same effect on neighboring sounds as emphatic consonants.

These changes are reflected in Shwa. The following rules approximate an educated pronunciation of Modern Standard Arabic, although the actual rules are much more complex and not at all standard :

• Coronal consonants s d t dh/z become ṣ ḍ ṭ dḥ/ẓ in the same word as an emphatic consonant.
• Next to any emphatic consonant, the vowel a retracts to ah, and short i retracts to ih .
• However, next to any other consonant except kh gh or ḷ, a advances to ae.
• In any case, short a at the end of a word becomes uh.

Here is an example in some detail. We're going to write the name of the famous Caliph of Baghdad, Hārūn 'ar-Rashīd bin Muḥammad bin 'al-Manṣūr, the hero of the Arabian Nights. Here is his name in traditional script:
  هَارُون الرَشِيد بِن مُحَمَّد بِن المَنصُور

Here is the same name in Shwa Alphabetic gait :

And here is the same name in the cursive Abjad gait :

Please bear in mind, as you compare the Arabic and Shwa versions, that Arabic calligraphy has had fifteen centuries to perfect their beautiful letterforms, while Shwa is just beginning - the example above is constant-width line on a grid. If you are a calligrapher, perhaps you'd like to show us how beautiful Shwa script can be. But the Abugida gait is based not on Arabic calligraphy, but on Islamic geometric art.

For now, why don't you try reading a sentence?

Islam

In addition to being the everyday language of 235 million people, Arabic is also the original language of Islam, the religion of almost a quarter of the world's population. Some Muslims may wonder whether the Qur'ān is just as holy when written in the Shwa script.

The answer is "yes". As devout Muslims know, the prophet Muḥammad (PBUH) could neither read nor write, which is one reason why the Qur'ān is so beautiful : it was meant to be recited. So there is nothing holy about the traditional script itself. When Turkish converted from the Arabic script to the Latin alphabet in 1926 (as did Albanian in 1909 and Malay by 1959), this subject was widely debated, and an article appeared (by Kılıçzade Hakkı in Hür Fikir, 17nov1926) entitled "Gabriel didn't bring the Arabic letters too, you know". Most of the world's Muslims don't use the Arabic script, in fact, among the world's six most populous Muslim nations only one (Pakistan) uses it.

If the Shwa script can write Classical Arabic better than the traditional script, then is it not a better vehicle for the Holy Qur'ān? And if the Muslims of the world write their own languages in the Shwa script, won't it be easier for them to read the Qur'ān in the same script?

Here is the shahādah, the Muslim profession of faith which is one of the five pillars of Islam, written in the Shwa script:

© 2002-2012 Shwa	shwa@shwa.org	22jan12