Counting the number of letters in the Arabic alphabet

Since leaving the US, I have met many people for whom English is a second language (if they don't speak any English, that limits my ability to interact with them to just about nil).

I asked many of them, 'How many letters are there in your alphabet?' since I'm always curious. And the answer I always got was '26'. Which seemed strange to me. How is it these alphabets have the exact same number of letters as the English version of the Latin alphabet?

The answer is that, when native-English speaking children go to their first day of school, the teacher always says, 'We are going to learn to read and write English. There are 26 letters in the alphabet, and 5 of them, a, e, i, o, and u, are vowels.' Then the teacher writes the alphabet, and the children all learn the alphabet song.

In English as a Second Language (ESL) classes, the teachers start in a similar way: 'We are going to learn English. There are 26 letters in the alphabet, and 5 of them, a, e, i, o, and u, are vowels.' The students probably don't know the English words 'letters' or 'alphabet' or '5' or 'vowels,' but those who pass the ESL course had better learn that, in the English version of the Latin alphabet, there are 26 letters, of which 5 are vowels.

(The teachers usually don't tell students the number of consonants, but given that there are 26 letters and 5 vowels, simple arithmetic shows there are 19 consonants. And if my maths seems strange, that's because English and maths don't mix: the English alphabet has 26 letters, of which 5 are vowels, and 19 are consonants!)

In most other languages, on the first day of school the teacher says, 'Today we are going to learn to read and write. This is the alphabet:' and then the teacher writes the alphabet and the children memorise the alphabet. But usually, the teacher does NOT teach the number of letters in the alphabet.

So the only language for which many ESL students know the number of letters is English, and, when asked the number of letters, most answer '26'. After all, in their own language, letter isn't 'letter', so just the word 'letter' makes them think, 'English letters, 26.'

When I went to Arabic classes, the teacher was terrible. He said, 'You must learn the Arabic alphabet,' then recited it quickly, and said, 'Now you know it. So you can start reading NOW.'

For more than 1,300 years, children who were fortunate enough to be able to study reading and writing Arabic were taught TWO alphabetical orders for the letters. One was the original order the Phoenicians came up with when they invented the Phoenician alphabet. Then, early Islamic scholars came up with a different alphabetical order, but those who already knew the Arabic alphabet in the Phoenician order found it very hard to learn the new order, so they kept using the old order, and told their students the old order was much easier to learn, so the alphabet they memorised was in the old order. Sometime in the past 50 years or so, most schools in the Arab world stopped teaching the old order. The teacher of my Arabic class gave us the old order (not in the textbook) and said we'd find it MUCH easier to learn the Arabic alphabet in that order instead of the proper alphabetical order (meaning, he didn't know anything about teaching or learning).

Of course, I counted, and there are (now) 28 letters in the Arabic alphabet. But Arabic is nothing at all like English, so there are letters that are not in the alphabet (Arabs use completely different words for letters in the alphabet and letters not in the alphabet, and think English should have different words for the different kinds of letters, but it doesn't).

It gets better. Arabic once had just 18 symbols. Kind of like English carved in stone, where one finds MVSEVMs and COVRTs OF IVSTICE, back when English used just 24 symbols for the 26 letters. In the early days of Islam, some Arabs wrote with marks called 'nukta' which makes it clear which of the 28 letters is intended by the 18 symbols. Without nukta, many different letters, e.g. the R and Z, are identical. During the first Islamic century, some Arab scribes used nukta, and some did not.

By the end of the third Islamic century, to make the Noble Koran as easy to read as possible, scribes started adding nukta and tashkeel, making it much easier to know how to recite the words. And today, Noble Korans for reciting also come with a colour code to show reciters the rhythm and meter of each phrase.

Today, for Arabic writing like newspaper articles, Arabs always write the nukta, but not the tashkeel, and no code for the rhythm and meter. So it's hard for a non-Arab who learned the alphabet to know how to pronounce the words in newspaper articles.