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

Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya wrote:
Greg,
... 


So, you are saying that just ignore alef maksura, right? See below.


Ignore the terminology, not the form. Better to call it something like "alif ya'iyya". It is referred to as "alif" in the
Arabic references I've looked, even though it looks just like yeh. It isn't called "alif maqsura". Why they decided to use the same name alif for two different shapes is something I haven't figured out yet. [But I just got an idea; see below.]

FYI, I did a little more reading in al-Nahw al-Wafiy regarding the definition of alif maqsura. It's not just a phonological marker, and a dotless ya following fatha at the end of a word is not necessarily a mark of maqsur. Technically, al-maqsur is a fully declinable *noun* ending in a necessary alif. The form of the alif is most often that of yeh, but sometimes is plain alif. Such a noun takes the three case endings on the alif, but *virtually* (تقديري) , since an alif cannot be following by the three case ending vowels. Verbs, indeclinable nouns, particles, etc. may end in the same yeh-shaped alif, but they are not considered maqsur. After that it gets complicated. ;)

The upshot of it is: you only need worry about the meaning of final dotless yeh: does it indicate a true yeh, or an alif? (The third category is dotless yeh with no semantics, i.e. seat of hamza or small alif. Such a yeh form is never final. If you see e.g. a fatha on a final )


This is a good info. So, it seems that we can't really ignore alef
maksura, so that we can have the correct encoding for the words. So,
do we need to go word by word basis to identify the maksura, or is
there any pattern to identify it (such as small alef)?


Mete mentions the rule in his posting. That's for fully marked Quranic text; for ordinary print you just have to know the grammar. For example, al-Nahw al-Wafy is printed in Egypt; it never uses final dotted yeh. So the author makes his meaning clear by explicitly refering to either yeh or alif when discussing examples.

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.

Ok, I mean the form. So, do you know any?

Haven't been able to find any. I can't think of any situation in which it would make sense either. I think you can safely proceed on the assumption that it does not occur; if you come across it you can still encode it with dotless yeh. 

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.


Let me get this one right. You are saying that alef maksura and the
dotless yeh with hamza or small alef is just a concept, not an actual
character, right? So we can use 649 the represent the concept?

Alif maqsura is a concept; dotless yeh is a form. In a sense it is not a full-fledged character, in that, like teh marbuta, it doesn't have first-class lexical status. It's more a kind of visual aid to the reader. I'm referring here to dotless-yeh-as-alif, not dotless-yeh-as-yeh.

So we have (at least) four encoding candidates:

1. this funny alif-in-dotless-yeh-clothing (Quranic and contemporary);
2. a dotless-yeh *form* that has no meaning and is used solely as a seat of hamza/small alef/etc. (Quranic and contemporary)
3. a true yeh that sometimes loses its spots (Quranic and occasionally contemporary);
4. a true yeh that always keeps its dots (contemporary usage)

Both items 1 and 2 are covered nicely by 0649 construed as pure form. One might object that this would eliminate the semantics of alif maqsura; but "alif maqsura" has two forms, dotless yeh and plain alif, so 0649 cannot encode it in any case. Also, you can always be sure that if a word ends in 0649, it represents alef, and not seat of anything.

For item 3, Farsi yeh seems perfect.  Item four is just 064A.

If you do things this way, you'll get the proper graphical representation, and search/sort will also work best.

It would be nice to have a dotless yeh codepoint with a medial form that would always just work. Unfortunately, if you add a suffix to a final alef-ya'iyya, sometimes it changes to plain alif, and sometimes it changes to dotted medial alif, and in the Quran it might change to a dotless medial or initial yeh. I haven't found a way around this.

Eureka!! Goodness, it just occurred to me why final dotless yeh is commonly referred to as alef. Maybe it is because originally (and still in the Quran) it was always the seat of small alif. Since it always implied the small alif without exception, people eventually just stopped writing the small alif but kept calling the dotless yeh "alef". In other words, what they really mean is "the unwritten small alif implied by the dotless yeh". In that case, items 1 and 2 above are the same case: dotless yeh that serves purely as a graphical aid to readers. No direct phonological semantics; in particular it does not *directly* mean the sound /a/ under this interpretation, but rather signals indirectly the presence of an unwritten following alif as well as a (possibly unwritten) preceding fatha. I don't know if that's what actually happened, but it works and it sure sounds like good folk etymology. ;)

Compare this with the plain alif that follows an indefinite accusative noun like كتابا, where the vowel and tanween are commonly omitted in contemporary practice. The alif in that case does not *directly* mean /an/ (it has no direct semantics); rather it simply tells us there is an implied fatha+tanween sitting on the preceding consonant.

As for "maqsur": I was under the impression that this dotless-yeh "meant" that an alif sound is shortened (maqsur); this is the explanation given in the standard English language Grammar of Arabic (Wright), which says al-alif al-maqsura is "the alif that can be abbreviated". But given the explanation in al-Nahw al-Wafy (which is much more thorough and subtle than anything in Wright), it makes more sense to think that the shortening refers not to the alif itself, but to the cutting-off of the case-ending vowels. It is the entire word that is shortened, since the case-ending vowels are considered to be there in some real sense, but are virtual and not pronounced - they get cut off, in a sense. So the alif is not abbreviated as per Wright, but merely not extended by other vowels. Wright makes no connection between maqsur and declension (إعراب), but that's the whole point according to al-Nahw al-Wafy. BTW, similar considerations apply for "mamduud"; in al-Nahw al-Wafy it's the *word* that is lengthened by an *extra* alif followed by hamza, whereas Wright claims it is a matter of "protecting" the length of the alif with the trailing hamza. It's looking to me like maybe Wright completely missed the boat on this one.

I guess you just can't trust Orientalists.  ;)

Similar word shapes that are verbs do not have the virtual case endings, so they are not considered to be shortened. Ditto for e.g. على, which is indeclinable and therefore fully pronounced, not shortened. So it is not maqsur, and the alef is not alef maqsura.

IOW, it isn't the alef that is maqsura, it is the word.

Isn't Arabic grammar fun? Seriously, the subtlety and finesse of traditional analysis is something to behold.

The question remains as to why they chose dotless yeh to carry the small alif, instead of some other graphical convention.

It's good that someone like yourself without strong Arabic is digging into this; it has forced me to do some research and thinking and discover things I hadn't thought of before. Actually I'm pretty pumped at the moment; it was only in the course of writing this that the reasoning behind the terminology etc. came to me. I only hope I'm not totally wrong. ;)

Cheers,

gregg