Someone on Quora linked to the Wikipedia article on the ‘Canaanite shift’:

In historical linguistics, the Canaanite shift is a sound change that took place in the Canaanite dialects, which belong to the Northwest Semitic branch of the Semitic languages family. This sound change caused Proto-NW-Semitic *ā (long a) to turn into ō (long o) in Proto- ( Read more... )

So Arabic, as you know, is written with connected letters - a bit like cursive English handwriting, except in Arabic, they do it even in print.

There are several writing styles, but what you'll see on computers is predominantly a style called Naskh. That's also what you'll typically see printed Arabic (as in, real books) in, in my experience.

( Read more... )