The Belarusian Arabic alphabet was based on the Arabic script and was developed in the 16th, possibly 15th, century from the need to write down the Belarusian language in the Arabic script. It had consisted of twenty-eight graphemes, however, adjusting for the Belarusian phonetics forced some pecularities, namely: The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing the Arabic language, which is the language of the Quran, the holy book of Islam. ... Belarusian (беларуская мова) is the language of the Belarusian people. ... The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing the Arabic language, which is the language of the Quran, the holy book of Islam. ...

• For the denoting of the soft «дз» and «ц» sounds, the graphemes

and

respectively, were constructed. These graphemes had been consistently used during the 18th-20th centuries.

• For the sounds «ж», «ч» and «п», which are absent from the Arabic language, the graphemes

and and The Arabic language (Arabic: ‎ transliterated: ), or simply Arabic (Arabic: ‎ transliterated: ), is the largest member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family (classification: South Central Semitic) and is closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. ...

respectively were constructed.

• The separate grapheme for the sound «ў» had not been introduced, and it had been denoted by the same grapheme, as the sound «в».

The users of the Belarusian Arabic alphabet were the Lipka Tatars, who had been invited to settle on Belarusian territories, and during the 14th-16th centuries had gradually stopped using their own language and started using the Old Belarusian language rendered in the Belarusian Arabic alphabet. The books of «Kitab» are the notable heritage of that literary tradition. There also existed Polish texts written in the Arabic script, dated not earlier than 17th cent. The Lipka Tatars were a noble military caste of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth who followed the Sunni branch of the Islamic religion and whose origins can be traced back to the Mongol Empire of Ghengis Khan, through the Khanate of the White Horde of Siberia. ... Ruthenian was a historic East Slavic language, spoken in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and after 1569 in the East Slavic territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. ... The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing the Arabic language, which is the language of the Quran, the holy book of Islam. ...

References

• Д-р Я. Станкевіч. Беларускія мусульмане і беларуская літаратура арабскім пісьмом. [Адбітка з гадавіка Беларускага Навуковага Таварыства, кн. I.] – Вільня : Друкарня Я. Левіна, 1933 ; Менск : Беларускае коопэрацыйна-выдавецкае таварыства ″Адраджэньне″, 1991 [факсімільн.]. – 3-е выд.

External links

• Kitabs, the unique highlight of the Belarusian language at pravapis.org