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

[Gregg Reynolds <gar at arabink dot com>]

Gregg Reynolds wrote:

> Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya wrote:
>
> > and maybe sometimes 649, by some users. What I understood from my
> > research is, traditionally, the final yeh does not come with the dots.
> > It was used mainly by non arabic speaker. Later one, it was somehow
> > adopted by arabic speaker somehow.

Hi again, Meor,

Don't belief everything you read on the web.  ;)

> FYI, this may be true historically, but in my opinion it is not

I correct myself: it is demonstrably *not* true historically.  See

http://ddc.aub.edu.lb/projects/jafet/manuscripts/

which, aside from being an amazing online resource of very old Arabic 
texts, provides numerous examples of dotted final yeh in Abbasid, 
Fatimid, and other manuscripts.

If that doesn't establish use of final dotted yeh as normal, standard, 
Arabic, I don't know what does.

(And regarding "foreign" in Arabic, considering the greatest of all Arab 
grammarians was a Persian who learned Arabic as a second language 
(http://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/studier/fag/arabisk/sibawayhi/HomePage/kitab.htm, 
where, btw, you can find more examples of dotted final yeh in scanned 
manuscripts), and that many of the finest poets and writers in the 
tradition were not native speakers, I don't see the use of the whole 
discussion.  Dotted final yeh was historically and remains today 
ordinary and correct in written Arabic.  Same for dottless final yeh.)

-gregg