Urdu alphabet

From UniLang Wiki

Introduction

The Urdu alphabet is derived from the Arabic-Farsi script and is used to write the language Urdu.

Urdu, like arabic and farsi, is written from left to right, and some short vowels are not expressed in everyday writing.

This writing system is mostly phonetic, meaning that each letter conveys the idea of one sound. There are 46 characters in total, 35 consonants and 11 vowels.

Note that the Urdu language is almost equivalent to Hindi, the main thing that sets them apart is the script, since hindi is written in devanagari.

Character Table

Take a look at the following character table (the green characters are urdu, the red ones are its hindi equivalents): Urdu characters are printed FOUR times. The first character (the right most character) is the isolated form, and will be followed by three of the same characters connected, so you can see the initial, medial and final form, like in all arabic derived scripts, Urdu characters may be written differently according to how they are attached to the next.

The vowels come in two rows, the upper most row is how they are written at the beginning of a word, and the lower row illustrated the vowel in combination with an example consonant (P in this case). Also note that the short vowel marks (the thin diagonal line or curl which you can see above or below a character) are NOT written normally.