Ba ب

Ba is the second letter of the Arabic script in the modern order and the second in the older abjad order, where it carries the numeral value two. Its basic shape is a shallow horizontal bowl with a single dot placed beneath it. That bowl is the most productive skeleton in the script: the same stroke with two dots above is ta, with three dots above is tha, with one dot above is nun, and with two dots below is ya. Five of the twenty-eight letters share one outline and are told apart by their pointing alone.

Ba joins on both sides and changes shape with position. Standing alone, or at the end of a word, it keeps the full bowl and its rising tail. At the beginning of a word and in the middle it contracts to a short upright tooth carrying its dot, so a reader meets it as a very different mark depending on where it falls. Almost every Arabic letter behaves this way, which is why an alphabet chart showing only isolated forms tells a reader rather little about the running script.

Ba is a moon letter, one of the fourteen before which the lam of the definite article is pronounced rather than assimilated. Its name descends from the Northwest Semitic beth, meaning house, and the letter is the direct cognate of Hebrew bet, Syriac beth and Samaritan bit. As throughout the Arabic sequence, the inherited name kept its shape and lost its sense: no Arabic speaker hears a house in it.

The dots that separate ba from ta, tha, nun and ya are called i'jam, and they were not part of the script when Arabic first began to be written. The Nabataean cursive from which Arabic descends offered fewer distinct shapes than Arabic had consonants, and early Arabic writing simply left the ambiguity in place, relying on a reader who already knew the language and often already knew the text. Someone who had a passage by heart did not need the script to tell one letter from another.

Dots appear in Arabic documents from the first century of Islam, and their extension to copies of the Quran was resisted before it was accepted. The tradition assigns the systematic pointing of the Quranic text to administrators and grammarians of Basra and Kufa under the Umayyads, and assigns the separate system of vowel marks to the same milieu, though who did what is reported differently by different sources and the details are not settled. The sequence itself is not in doubt: consonantal skeleton first, consonantal pointing second, vowel marking third.

The two systems remain visually distinct. The i'jam dots are written in the same ink and the same weight as the letters and belong to the spelling, so a word written without them is misspelled. The vowel marks, tashkil, are small strokes and circles above and below the line, frequently written in a second colour in early manuscripts, and they are optional in ordinary modern printing. A newspaper prints the dots and omits the vowels. A Quran prints both, because the exactness of the recitation the marks were devised to protect depends on them.