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Ancient North Arabian is a language known from fragmentary inscriptions in modern-day Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia, dating to between roughly the 8th century BC and the 6th century AD, all written in scripts derived from Epigraphic South Arabian. Pre-classical Arabic (or Old Arabic), the predecessor of Classical Arabic, seems to have coexisted with these languages in central and north Arabia.[2] However, Arabic remained exclusively a spoken language until it was first attested in an inscription in Qaryat al-Faw (formerly Qaryat Dhat Kahil, near Sulayyil, Saudi Arabia) in the 1st century BC.[2][3]
Ancient North Arabian includes a number of closely related extinct dialects of pre-Islamic Arabia, summarized as Ancient or Old North Arabian:[3][4]
It is provisionally considered an Ancient North Arabian dialect but unlike the others it used the Ancient South Arabian alphabet with minor adaptations.
The main characteristic differences between Classical Arabic (CA) and Ancient North Arabian:
^* ʼil and niʻmat being deity names.
Narb, 106
The Ancient North Arabian alphabets are a group of related alphabets used to write all of the Ancient North Arabian dialects except Hasaitic, which used the Ancient South Arabian alphabet.[4][8] The names of the alphabets match the names of the dialects they represent.
Taymanitic had twenty-six or twenty-seven letters while the other alphabets generally used twenty-eight letters. All the letters represent consonants. Vowels were not indicated although some Dadanitic texts make limited use of matres lectionis to mark long vowels.
Dumaitic and Dadanitic were typically written right-to-left. Taymanitic was written right-to-left, left-to-right, or boustrophedon (changing direction from right-to-left to left-to-right with each new line). Thamudic C and D were usually written vertically downwards. Safaitic, Hismaic, and Thamudic B were written in any direction: right-to-left, left-to-right, vertically downwards or upwards, even in circles, coils, and zig-zags. Letter shapes may be reversed in lines running left-to-right but not always in Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions.
Most dialects were written continuously without spaces between words. Dadanitic monumental texts normally used a word divider which looked like "|". Dumaitic, Taymanitic, and Dadanitic graffiti commonly but inconsistently used a word divider.
Numbers were formed using combinations of three characters: one, ten, and twenty. For example, nine was represented by the character for one repeated nine times. Thirty was represented by the character for twenty followed by the character for ten. They were written right-to-left.
The Ancient North Arabian alphabets were added to the Unicode Standard in June, 2014 with the release of version 7.0.
The Unicode block, called Old North Arabian, is U+10A80–U+10A9F.
Note that U+10A9D OLD NORTH ARABIAN NUMBER ONE (𐪝) represents both the numeral one and a word divider.[8]
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