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

[Gregg Reynolds <gar at arabink dot com>]

Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya wrote:

> Therefore we recommend ADN not to support folding, except the folding
> of YEH (U+064A) at the end of the word to ALEF MAKSOURA (U+0649)."

I'm not sure what this means, but if it means equating a final ya qua 
consonant or kasra lengthener with a final ya qua alif maksura it would 
colossally stupid.  Which means, if Unicode has anything to do with it, 
that it will probably be adopted.
...
> 2. I'm still not satisfied with the definition of alef maksura. Is
> alef, or yeh, or depends on the context? Is it true as what Greg
> mentioned, it is not just the dotless yeh with alef sound, but
> sometimes it is written as alefs? If alef maksura only at the end of
> words, or it can happen in the middle as well? Does it always wirtten
> with small alef, as the above document describe?

My advice is to forget you ever heard the words "alef maksura".  It is 
totally a red herring.  What I have mentioned previous posts is only the 
tip of the iceberg.  The grammatical concept involved is in fact very 
hairy and subtle, and has little if anything to do with letter forms and 
a whole lot to do with traditional grammatical analysis.  It gets into 
arcane matters of actual v. virtual declension, inflection, etc.  You 
don't want to know, believe me.  Just worry about dotted v. dotless ya 
*forms*.

> To solve this probem, I think we need the following information:
> 1. List of common words that uses alef maksura and how it changes when
> combine  with suffixes/prefixes.

That's easy; but what do you mean by "alef maksura"?  ;)  Ya form or 
alif form?  Technically only nouns of certain classes are maqsura; e.g. 
فتى، هدى، رضا etc.  By contrast, verbs and particles that seem to be 
maqsura are not, e.g. إلى، على، لدى، دعا، سعى etc.  Also إذا and ما are 
not maqsura.  (Of course, it depends on which Grammarian you listen to; 
this info is from the standard - and encyclopedic - النحو الوافي vol. 1.)

> 2. Investigate any other use of dotless yeh in initial/medial position
> other than in combination with small alef and hamza.

Be careful to distinguish between position and form.  Initial form can 
occur in both word-initial and word-medial position.

> 3. To define what is exactly dotless yeh with small alef in
> initial/medial position.

The yeh form is just that: a form, serving as a seat for small alef or 
hamza.

-gregg