Nicholas Bodley wrote:

>At the Bahá'í Persian (I assume Farsi) site,
><http://www.bahai.org/persian/>, there's a picture of some people at the
>left. Underneath is some blue* Arabic script, which surely looks oblique
>to my eyes! I'm wondering whether it should slope the other way, like
>"citali", reverse-slanted oblique. *In my browser
>

The text is merely italicized Arabic scipt, whose fontfacing depends on
which Arabic-compatible font you've designated for your browser.

Like the other preceding responses have said, Persian prefers a
"slanted/oblique" style, but then again, so does Urdu, Sindhi, Pashto,
etc...

>The text size is quite small, so I magnified it to see what Farsi looks
>like. My hope is to learn to "cheat" :) , to see some distinctive details
>that distinguish it from the Arabic language; to do this without extensive
>study of both. Especially in the last few years, I have been studying the
>appearance of Arabic; it looks less strange with every new season. What I
>see as distinctive in Farsi is consecutive letters, each with double dots;
>I don't recall seeing those in Arabic.
>

I would agree that rpesence of any of the extended letters, e.g. peh,
cheh, geh, etc., would give any non-Arab script away as beign non-Arabic.

As for double-dotted letters in a row... it's also common in Arabic...
just depends on the word, e.g. /yaktatibu/ "to copy" (imperfect)
[يكتتب], etc.

cheers,
-Patrick
UC Berkeley: Dept of Linguistics: PhD student