Learning Arabic

[Figleaf]

@Adilson if you are interested in coins with Arabic writing, it pays to learn how to read them. Try buying this book - you can probably find it cheaper elsewhere.

That can't be done in the short run, but what you can do right now is make a cheat sheet. Use Google translate to create a list of key words in e.g. Excel on Arabic words on coins, e.g. falus (copper coin), sultan (title), Mohammed (name), zarb fi (struck at) Misr, Constantinopel, Kabul, Herat (mint places). Expand with what you find useful, e.g. if you move to silver coins it is handy if you can recognise the beginning of the Kalima. Sort alphabetically and use often!

To learn numbers and convert dates, use this site.

Have fun,

Peter

[Adilson]

Excellent tip, I really like Arabic coins, but I don't understand a letter.
I really wanted to learn a little, I wanted to consider at least the words, Kabul, Herat, falus, zarb, etc. I've already taken several prints of Saro's explanatory drawings.
I will research this book and the website.
Thanks Peter.

[aws22]

Dear Adilson, in addition to learning Arabic you need to know Arabic (Islamic) calligraphy which is more difficult. Each calligrapher has his own way of writing letters as part of showing the art of text writing.
An example of this, attached:
جمعه مباركة , Blessed Friday

Maythem

[Figleaf]

And in addition, there is Kufi script and the completely unreadable toughra, but they are not for beginners. One technique you can use early on is mnemonics. I can recognise Constantinople - القسطنطينية immediately because the letters tnt - طنط - remind me of two minarets of the Hagia Sophia Mosque, while zarb on coins looks like a 9 with an extra wave, especially when it's written sloping down.

Peter

[aws22]

Dear Adilson, another example of calligraphy is the way of writing the first letter " Ha ها " of the word " Hamadan همدان ", it looked strange to me, please see this coin style of writing letter " Ha ها " in this attachment:

Maythem

[Adilson]

Thank you masters Peter and Maythem, it is really very difficult to read Islamic coins. I looked at Master Maythem's example and couldn't see the lyrics.
Congratulations on your wisdom, if I can get even a single drop of this wisdom, I will be happy.

[jkk]

Excellent tip, I really like Arabic coins, but I don't understand a letter.
I really wanted to learn a little, I wanted to consider at least the words, Kabul, Herat, falus, zarb, etc. I've already taken several prints of Saro's explanatory drawings.
I will research this book and the website.
Thanks Peter.

Darb (the letter is actually a deep D) looks like a tadpole. At least the dad ra part does. The ba is written in isolation (unconnected) because ra is one of the 'unfriendly' letters that will not connect to a following letter. Here's what you are up against (and I'm not trying to discourage, but to teach some of the basics):

Most older coins in Arabic leave out some of the dots. They are not optional and are part of the letter, so you just have to accept for example that a letter could be shin or sin, sad or dad; or in the worst situation, ta, nun, ya, tha, or ba. As for vowel marks, forget it.

There are important bits of text to learn to recognize at sight. The name Muhammad is very distinctive because the presence of the Ha (a breathy h) means that one mim is actually above it, one below. Same for the name of God in Arabic, but even more distinctive because it is written uniquely. Can't really mistake it for anything else.

A good way to learn these is to study the Kalima (not sure which number Kalima I'm talking about here; there are like six or so, and I'm not a Muslim). The most common one is the one that says 'there is no god but Al-lah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Al-lah.' Why this is useful is because not only does it contain the name of Muhammad, but it shows the name of God in two instances plus one where it's not the name, but simply the term for a god (thus written differently from the standard proper noun). It won't take you very long to be able to recognize the Kalima, and to see that when there is other text included, it's probably one of the other Kalimas. These are basic statements of Islamic faith, of course.

The numbers aren't difficult, though somewhat counterintuitive for me.

The best way to learn to transliterate it is to start writing it. If you want to feel elegant, use a calligraphy pen and begin with a script called thuluth ('one-third'), which refers to the angle at which you position the tip of the pen; if you think of the standard position being horizontal, rotate it counterclockwise about a third of the way to vertical, and your alignment is correct. Most modern coins with Arabic on them are in thuluth.

At least try to articulate it. There are eight letters with front and deep versions; the deep versions drag the adjoining sounds back in the throat. I mentioned dad earlier; the front d is dal, and dad is the deep d. Say what sounds like 'dodd' but pull your tongue back as you say the first d. If it sounds like you slightly choked on something, good job.

One key item to know about is called a shidda. Any time you see transliterated Arabic written with a double letter, that's because there's this little diacritical (rarely written on older coins) that looks like a w. It says 'literally pronounce this letter twice.' That's why you always see two Ms in Muhammad; there's a shidda over the second mim. A shidda is found above the name of God in Arabic, but that's the uniqueness of the way it's written because in this word alone are there written two lams. I suppose it makes the shidda superfluous, except that the Qur'an doesn't change from its original, so however it was written back in the day, that's how it's going to be written for presumably more millennia. Arabic isn't the only language with this situation. Finnish has double letters and one has to pronounce them twice.

While some of the consonants stand in as if they were vowels, as an abjad, the Arabic alphabet (abjad comes from the first for letters: elif ba jim dal) is all consonants. There are vowel marks, but most of the time you will have to suss out whether to pronounce a waw as W, U, or O.

Farsi uses, I think, four letters (made so by the number of dots) for sounds found in that Indo-European language not found in Arabic, which of course is Semitic. There's a pa, a zheh, and a couple more I believe. I think this is also used to write some Afghan languages. The Iranian calligraphic style is distinctive and generally entails the vertical strokes sort of leaning right and going gently into the swoops below, which are also more angled than in for example thuluth.

I hope at least some of that is clear and that someone like Maythem, with deep and broad knowledge of what I believe is his native language, will correct any mistakes I made.

[capnbirdseye]

Also take into account that coins of Mughals and Princely states etc use Persian script which differs for some of the letters
Later coins of Jodhpur state for e.g use Urdu script a variation noticeable on the letters D on the spelling of Edward

[THCoins]

Another often usefull learning tool: Google translate. But not to translate.
If you put the left window to Arab, you can type Latin letters in that window of what you think an arab word like "Sultan" sounds like. Google translate will than propose examples in Arab script of what it thinks you might mean. It takes some getting used to, but is powerfull.
The desktop version sometimes behaves a bit different from the mobile version.
Sometimes it pays off to try things with language set to Urdu or Persian instead of Arab.

[FosseWay]

Related to the last post, it's important to remember that not all coins inscribed in Arabic script are written in Arabic, just as not all coins inscribed in the Latin alphabet are written in Latin. Persian and Urdu use the Arabic script, but are not related at all to Arabic. They therefore look quite different from Arabic, with extra letters (like the P of Pakistan, which exists in Urdu but not Arabic) and different common combinations ("al" - "the" - is very common in Arabic, less so in other languages).

[jkk]

Another example is that Turkish was written in the Arabic abjad until, I think it was 1923 when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk took his new republic in the Western direction. However, much of what one sees on Ottoman coinage is religious in nature or origin and tends to be in Arabic. And Peter is right about the toughras (imperial sigils) found on Ottoman coinage and also in some Afghan pieces--they're problematic for the new arrival to the language.

[FosseWay]

If your primary reason for wanting to read the toughras is to identify the coin (rather than as an academic end in itself), I generally find that you can ignore them and use the date instead. Ottoman coins generally have either the actual Hijri date or (more often) the accession year of the sultan plus a regnal year. No doubt there are some dateless coins where being able to decipher the toughra would be helpful, but certainly for easily available "modern" Ottoman coins, say 18th century CE onwards, the date will do.

The denomination, on the other hand, can sometimes only be certainly identified by weighing the piece, as they often carry no explicit mark.

[Adilson]

I'm happy to be in this select group of masters.
The level of knowledge here at WoC is extremely high, I will be attentive to all the tips from my friends. Thank you to everyone who took the time to write this post.

[aws22]

Thank you Jonathan; well explained, I have nothing to add. Arabic is my native language but it is also difficult for me; as an Engineer, I did not get deep into the Arabic language. In reading Islamic coins, you need what is called "Sentence intelligibility", that is from one or two words you can predict the rest of the sentence or phrase and that requires great knowledge of history of the Islamic era.

Maythem

[jkk]

Very true, Maythem (and thank you!). The upside of this is that very many coins of the Islamic world have religious themes that use particular phrases, most notably Kalimas and rightly-guided Caliphs' names, plus of course dates and darbs.

The funny thing for me is that I absolutely get what you say about not taking a deep dive. In my non-coin life, I'm a freelance editor (American English); I also work part-time for a forest products consulting company, in large part editing their proposals and reports. My father was an engineer and quite good at it, but as I reached high school I could see that his English skills were behind my own. I majored in history, so I did do that deep dive into my native language. If these coins were in older versions of English, I'd be able to deploy some understanding of Latin and Greek, as well as some other languages (especially French and my bit of Swedish) and possibly suss out the sorts of details you seem able to do with minimal exertion.

So it's humbling to me to have to plod through Arabic, but also very rewarding and edifying. A coin album is a museum, and museums teach us history. History teaches us understanding and perspective.