are the 32 letters of the modern Persian alphabet. Since the script is cursive, the appearance of a letter changes depending on its position: isolated, initial (joined on the left), medial (joined on both sides) and final (joined on the right) of a word. The names of the letters are mostly the ones used in Arabic except for the Persian pronunciation. The only ambiguous name is , which is used for both and . For clarification, they are often called (literally "-like " after , the name for the letter that uses the same base form) and (literally "two-eyed ", after the contextual middle letterform ), respectively. Overview table Historically, in Early New Persian, there was a special letter for the sound . This letter is no longer used, as the -sound changed to , e.g. archaic /zaβān/ > 'language'. Variants Letter construction The i'jam diacritic characters are illustrative only; in most typesetting the combined characters in the middle of the table are used. Persian yē has 2 dots below in the initial and middle positions only. The standard Arabic version always has 2 dots below. Letters that do not link to a following letter Seven letters (, , , , , , ) do not connect to the following letter, unlike the rest of the letters of the alphabet. The seven letters have the same form in isolated and initial position and a second form in medial and final position. For example, when the letter is at the beginning of a word such as ("here"), the same form is used as in an isolated . In the case of ("today"), the letter takes the final form and the letter takes the isolated form, but they are in the middle of the word, and also has its isolated form, but it occurs at the end of the word. Diacritics Persian script has adopted a subset of Arabic diacritics: ( in Arabic), ( in Arabic), and or ( in Arabic, pronounced in Western Persian), and (gemination). Other Arabic diacritics may be seen in Arabic loanwords in Persian. Short vowels Of the four Arabic short vowels, the Persian language has adopted the following three. The last one, sukūn, has not been adopted. There is no standard transliteration for Persian. The letters 'i' and 'u' are only ever used as short vowels when transliterating Dari or Tajik Persian. See Persian Phonology Diacritics differ