Talk:Urdu alphabet

Urdu chart

I have added a Urdu vowel chart, which was graciously created by Shibo77 on my subpage Urduchart. Thanks. Mar de Sin ^{Talk to me!} 20:55, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

History not accurate

The history section is at best badly written and at worst horribly inaccurate. The script used by the Sassanid Empire i.e. Pahlavi immediately before the Islamic conquest was influenced directly by the Aramaic alphabet and Arabic was developed from the Nabatean alphabet. Persia was in contact with Mesopotamia and the Levant more than Arabia. The Arab Invasion saw to it to remove as much Sassanian influence from Iran as possible and thus forced the use of the Arabic script on Persians. The only thing Persian about the script is that both Naskh and Nastaliq were invented by Persians post-conquest but those are styles of calligraphy derived from Kufic, not entirely different systems altogether. Moreover, it seems as though the author of that section tried to rewrite history to provide rationale and precedence for the use of a foreign script by giving it an Aryan (Persian) and thus more dare-I-say "Indian" origin. Of course, there really isn't much need for that since most countries use a foreign script anyway. I suggest that someone rewrite this section. Xerces1492 (talk) 14:38, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

'a' sound missing

I could not find the symbol for a as in aam عام Please tell if ʿain (as on the Article (item no 24 in the table) has two "initial forms"; one as there and another as here in عام (aam = mango/common)? - Saurabh 117.198.128.110 (talk) 14:44, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

In Urdu ʕɑːm(:meaning common:عام) and ɑːm(:mangoe:آم) are diferrent. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.63.143.111 (talk) 08:14, 22 May 2014 (UTC)

Letters in Alphabet Table

Do the letters in the alphabet table appear correct for anyone? They don't for me.

I've tried loading the pages from various devices, and they are either not in Nastaliq (when I use Apple products) or don't display correctly (with PC). The dashes before the characters don't seem to change the letters to their medial or final forms.

Just trying to figure out if this issue is limited to me, or something wrong with the page.

Nastaliq: ـجـ

No Nastaliq: ـجـ

Possible solution: use the zero-width jointer "‍" character instead of "ـ"

No.	Name	Transcription	IPA	Contextual forms			Isolated
				Final	Medial	Initial
6	sē	s	/s/	‍ث	‍ث‍	ث‍	ث
7	jīm	j	/d͡ʒ/	‍ج	‍ج‍	ج‍	ج

If the problem's not limited to me, I'll update the table to look like the above format.

Muldoon99 (talk) 16:04, 14 June 2014 (UTC)Muldoon99

@Muldoon99: Nice catch... Actually no Apple device has a Nastaliq font built-in, so displaying Nastaliq is impossible on an Apple device. I don't know any other OS which has a built-in Nastaliq font (Android, Linux, Chrome OS). The only devices with built in Nastaliq fonts are devices running Windows 8.x OS and Windows Phone 8.x OS (thanks to Microsoft for adding the font 'Urdu Typesetting'). Another issue is that the Nastaliq fonts available don't allow for separate contextual forms, one reason being that the contextual forms vary greatly in size and shape depending on the surrounding letters. So it is impractical to include contextual forms when there are so many for a single letter. One solution could be removing contextual Nastaliq forms altogether and avoiding the fuss. Another way to fix this thing for all devices what-so-ever is to create seperate .svg images for ALL possible contextual forms in some Nastaliq font. I am going to start work on the latter proposal. —ШαмıQ✍ @ 16:17, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Missing ہ

Hello, I was looking for information on the character ہ but I did not find it here. I am talking about the character used in the first part of the words ہی، ہم، ہوں (hai, ham, houn). This character is not displayed the same way for me as any of the he characters displayed on this page. —biocrite _{{📠Talk • 📝Contribs}} 14:12, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Curious. That's choti he ہ, but for some reason a previous user removed it from the table. They seem to have made a lot of...unusual...changes to the alphabet table that I'm not quite certain of (I don't think "ya" or "lalalif" count as letters, though maybe there could be a section for the unusual conjuncts). I'm going to look for a solid source for the alphabet, since it seems like a lot of alphabet table changes have been done based on personal preference. Muldoon99 (talk) 15:15, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Nastaliq not loaded?

In the subsection labeled "Kāf or Gāf with Alif or Lām", the difference in the forms is not visible to me because the font loaded is Tahoma, or at least looks much like Tahoma. Nastaliq is not showing!

Edit: I think there is already an issue with Nastaliq . 3omarz (talk) 07:31, 30 August 2015 (UTC)