Question:How does Arabic "work"?
Answer: Arabic is one of the Semitic languages, a group that also includes Hebrew and some Ethiopian languages. The ancient, "dead" tongues of Babylonia and Assyria were also in the Semitic family, as was Aramaic, the language of Jesus. (Aramaic is still spoken in a few areas in the Middle East.)
"Semitic" comes from the Greek and Latin form of Shem, the name of the eldest son of Noah in the Bible. Shem, according to Genesis, was the common ancestor of many Semitic-speaking people.
Semitic languages have a characteristic system for building vocabulary: They form words using "roots" or "radicals" consisting largely of three consonants that convey a general meaning
In Arabic, for instance, the three-consonant root K-T-B (in Arabic letters, of course) conveys the general idea of writing. By adding vowels, prefixes and suffixes to it, K-T-B can be modified to express all kinds of meanings related to writing. Adding three short "A's" produces KaTaBa, the verb "to write." Similarly, KiTaaB, with "aa" indicating a long "A" sound, is the word for "book." An office, a place of much writing, is a maKTaB, and a library or bookstore is a maKTaBa.
(This example comes from "The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read and Write It," by Nicholas Awde and Putros Samano, a useful introduction to writing Arabic.)
Arabic texts, except for the Koran and school primers, are normally written and printed without symbols for "short vowels." The vowel and prefix/suffix patterns in Arabic and other Semitic languages are so regular that practiced readers usually have little difficulty in supplying the "missing" vowels. When it is necessary to show the short vowels, small dashes and commalike marks are written above or below the consonants.
English and its relatives are less regular in this regard.
Arabic, like English, is written with a true alphabet, not hieroglyphics or ideograms. Many of the letters, though, are attached to one another, as in our handwritten script. And Arabic, like Hebrew, is written from right to left.