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Roll 2026-1116:9
Urdu Took 28 Letters From Arabic. Where Did the Other 11 Come From?
About this piece
Urdu is written with 39 letters of the Arabic alphabet. 28 came from Arabic. A viewer asked about the other 11, and about their Unicode numbers.
پ is ب with 2 more dots. ٹ is ت with a tiny ط on top. ں is ن with its dot taken away. Not one of the 11 is a brand new shape.
In Unicode, 26 of the 39 sit in Arabic's own row and 13 live far down the block, so sorting by number scrambles the dictionary. ک and ك can look exactly the same and still be different text, so a search walks right past one of them. And in the Urdu hand, every word hangs downhill, one letter sitting on the next one's shoulder.
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