From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Michael Everson scripsit: > > > Well. Depends what you mean by "forms". Our taxonomy currently lists > > Samaritan, Square Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and Mandaic as modern (RTL) > > forms of the parent Phoenician. > > Arabic and Syriac have very specialized shaping behavior which makes them > obviously distinct from their parent form. I believe that Mandaic has > this property too.
The normative shaping of Arabic looks more like an evolution from hand-drawn ligatures which have finally completely modified their component letters so that they are now hard to see (same thing in Brahmic scripts). Today the joining is normative, but I'm quite sure that such aspect of the Arabic script was much less normative in its historic variants, and they became normative once they were used by sacred texts. Arabic typography is extremely rich and full of many features, some of which are normative but there are lots of variants, some of them purely decorative or illustrative. This may be also the result of the proscription in Quran to make graphic representation of God, in favor of the words of the actual text, so its decoration was used to enhance the beauty of the represented text. Someone who visits some of the most beautiful mosquees will immediately see that there's no sacred "icon" of God or its representants, but lots of graphic presentations of sacred words with many typographic enhancements, where the shapes of letters are used to create pseudo-images with very inventive layouts. I see this as a long evolution influenced by religious requirements, and the general agreement to make the sacred script distinct from all others, despite of its origins. In islamic communities, the Quran text has always been (and is still) the most common text used for teaching the Arabic script, and the main vector of education. Lots of African children will learn to read and write only by studying the Quran text, and there are no other education offered to them beside Quranic schools. Such personal study of sacred texts is normally a requirement for all muslems, and the only way to comply with this requirement is to learn reading and writing its script.
