I will be working a local election again, and Los Angeles County has added three languages to those in which voting materials are available–Armenian, Russian, and Farsi.
I know that Farsi and Urdu, and Arabic, of course, are written in that script. Is there a way to tell those three written languages apart?
Farsi and Urdu are usually written in a different style than Arabic. Hard to describe.
Arabic
The letters in Arabic seems be “more connected”. You also see a lot of “al” in Arabic, not so much in Farsi. “al” in Arabic looks like the first 2 letters here (reading from the right): القاعدة
One thing to keep in mind is that Arabic script was designed, oddly enough, for Arabic which is a Semitic language. Semitic languages tend to have words based on a roots consisting of 3 consonants. (Think Salam = SLM) Each arabic letter has three forms, depending on whether it is at the beginning, middle or end of the word.
Farsi and Urdu are Indo-Eurpean languages, which do not have this basis of 3-consonant root words, so the Arabic alphabet isn’t an ideal fit.
I once read that Turkish, which used to be written in Arabic script, wasn’t suited for it either: According to the source, Turkish had eight vowel sounds and Arabic only three.
For example, check out these translations of the start of the Biblical Book of Genesis in Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu.
Some things to look out for, besides the ones John Mace mentioned:
Farsi and Urdu look quite a bit alike, but the conjunction “and” is “wa” و in Arabic and Farsi, but “aur” اور in Urdu.
The “three-dots-under” rule: All three languages use a script that has a little triangle of three dots over some of the consonants, but Arabic script doesn’t employ letters with three dots under them, whereas Persian and Urdu do. Like this: چگونه, پيش
The “heart five”: If decimal numerals are written in the language’s own script, you will see the number 5 as a little circle in Arabic, but a sort of upside-down heart shape in Farsi and (usually) Urdu.
Scripts are usually adapted for whatever local language chooses to adopt them. When English adopted the Latin alphabet it added letters from the original 23 to make 26; some other European languages added more, some removed letters (Italian only uses 21).
The Persian alphabet (which is used by Farsi and Urdu) added a few letters to represent sounds not found in Arabic پ /p/, چ /ch/, ژ /je/, and گ /ɡ/.