... the countries and capital cities of the Middle East and North Africa in Arabic, A last word of advice Although the Arabic script looks complicated and forbidding at first glance, it is actually ... Arabic and Roman (and Greek and Russian) alphabets, no matter how different they may look, all have a common distant ancestor You can also see a hint of this common descent in the sequence k, ... they come in pairs: each vowel can be either long or short The difference between long and short vowels is important in both speech and writing, and the distinction actually affects meaning in many...