Re: Questions about yeh, hamzah on yeh, alef maksura and dotless ba

[Mete Kural <metek at touchtonecorp dot com>]

Gregg Reynolds wrote:

> Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya wrote:
>  
>
> I wasn't even aware of this.  :)  It's exactly what is needed, not only
> for Quranic text, but for ordinary print - in Egypt especially it is
> common for printed text to omit the two dots of a final ya, as in the
> word "fi" (في = فى).  With this (misnamed) codepoint you get to desired
> graphical representation while retaining the semantics of ya.  But you
> don't want to use it everywhere - the dotless ya of ila ٌٌإلى and the
> dotless ya of fi فى are not the same semantically.
>  
Yes, grammatically they are not the same - one is alef maksura, one is 
yeh proper, but orthographically they are both a yeh. So I think the 
same codepoint should be used for both. As far as I remember, Farsi Yeh 
turns out to be the most appropriate character to encode this most yehs 
in the Qur'an including the above two, despite the name misnomer. Right 
Tom? Indeed what is called Farsi Yeh is a Classical Arabic Yeh, but 
perhaps not completely so. I am curious, do you guys know whether a 
Farsi Yeh is supposed to loose its dots when a "hamza above" follows it? 
If so, then the Farsi Yeh might truly be a Classical Arabic Yeh, hence a 
Qur'anic Arabic Yeh. If it doesn't loose its dots when a "hamza above" 
follows it then it is partially a Classical Arabic Yeh. But it still 
seems like the best choice for Qur'an Yehs among all the other mess of 
Yehs in Unicode Arabic.

One thing to clarify, in Classical Arabic, "orthographically" (not 
grammatically), the initial and medial proper yehs, the final yehs, the 
yehs that are the chair of hamza, all of them, are simply a "yeh". 
Grammarians have given them different names based on their grammatical 
context, but orthographically speaking, they should all be considered a 
Yeh. If Farsi Yeh really fulfills the promise of handling all these 
contexual instance of Yeh in Classical Arabic fairly, then it may truly 
be the Classical Arabic Yeh that we are desperately looking for.

Regards,
Mete