I would strongly encourage anyone who knows an Arabic-script
language to learn how to type in it. This isn’t as difficult as
one might imagine — especially on mobile devices,
whose support for various languages is now often more seamless
than that of desktop operating systems — and it
opens up a whole new world of resources online. However, if you
would like to use this abjad calculator but cannot type
your input directly, there are a couple of alternatives. First,
Google has developed clever tools for both
Arabic
and
Persian
that allow you to enter a phonetic approximation of your
intended words in Latin script, and then transliterate them with
little fuss. You could use one of these tools and copy-paste the
result into the box above. The second fallback option is
actually a separate version of this page, in
which buttons may be used to enter Arabic or Persian words one
letter at a time.
By default, this program will assign an abjad value of
1 to the isolated form of hamzah (ء), treating it the
same as if it were placed on an alif. Since this is not
a universally agreed-upon practice, there is a checkbox to allow
for the isolated hamzah to be ignored in calculation.
(Please refer to the following section for more information on
this dilemma and others like it.)
I’ve set the default letter values according to the more common
“Eastern” convention. There is now an option to switch to the
Maghribi order using a checkbox, for those who need it. Please
refer to this table for a reminder of the
differences between the two systems. (Only you can determine
which of them is applicable to your sources.)
Feel free to include spaces between words, or even
zero-width non-joiners; they won’t affect the calculation.
More broadly, the program is designed to ignore any character
that it doesn’t recognize. If you enter a string of text
containing one or more extraneous characters, you’ll see a brief
error message, followed by the total abjad value of the
parts that were counted — i.e.,
our best guess. It may still be correct…
I recommend that you not include punctuation, or diacritical
marks, or
dagger alifs, or anything else outside of the “base letters.” Only the last
category is counted in the abjad system, anyway, so why
add complication?
If you’re confident that you entered valid text in Arabic or
Persian script, but you received an error message, please let me
know by email. It might
be a bug!
The fundamentals of abjad numerals are covered in the
relevant
Wikipedia entry, and they are observed here faithfully. (I’ve also posted a
table of letter values for good measure.)
If one digs a bit deeper, however, questions and ambiguities
begin to arise…
The treatment of the four “Persian
letters” — pe, che,
zhe, and gāf — is in fact
relatively straightforward. Please refer to the same Wikipedia
entry. In general, there should be no problem using Persian
text. (Urdu? Pashto? I’m afraid those alphabets are not yet
fully integrated.)
There is, however, one potentially confusing point in Persian:
the
silent hā’. The answer is to treat this letter as we would any other
hā’. (See the following note for the reasoning here.)
Also, if you are among the stubborn few who use the Unicode
character 06C0 (ۀ) to represent iżāfah on
a silent hā’, that will be recognized just the same.
This program treats the Arabic letter
tā’ marbūṭah
as if it were hā’ and assigns it a value of 5. This is
due to a general principle in abjad calculation, that
we judge letters by their form (rasm), rather
than by their pronunciation or other factors.
Similarly,
alif maqṣūrah
is considered equivalent to yā’ and assigned a value of
10.
The treatment of
hamzah
is most troublesome of all, since it appears in conjunction with
several different letters. But we need only continue to
prioritize form. Hamzah on wāw (ؤ) is given
the value of wāw (6). Hamzah on
yā’ (ئ) is given the value of yā’ (10). Any
variant of hamzah on alif, unsurprisingly,
receives a value of 1. Finally, as has been explained above,
this program does assign a value of 1 to the isolated
form of hamzah (ء), which is most often found at the
end of certain Arabic words. This is a contested point; a few of
the guides that I consulted state explicitly that
hamzah by itself should not be counted, since the
appropriate value would come from the letter on which it is
seated. In the end, I followed position of the Baha’i community.
It has long been symbolically important in their faith that the
name Bahā’ (بهاء) has an abjad value of 9, which
requires that the final hamzah be counted. Users who
don’t want this feature can disable it.
It bears emphasis that any form of alif will be given a
value of 1. This includes
alif maddah, which some have treated as a “double
hamzah alif ” with a value of 2. Here we may
invoke another general principle of abjad numerals:
each letter is counted once. Just as
shaddah
is (typically) not taken into consideration, nor should
alif maddah receive double value.