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

["Thomas Milo" <t dot milo at chello dot nl>]

Gregg Reynolds wrote:
>> FYI, this may be true historically, but in my opinion it is not
>> especially relevant.  Today final yeh (with yeh semantics) is dotted
>> virtually everywhere in the Arab world.  Egypt is the major
>> exception, but even in Egypt use of dotted final yeh is commmon (see
>> the official newspaper of Egypt at
>> http://www.ahram.org.eg/Index.asp?CurFN=fron1.htm&DID=8715).

So is Iraq.

>> If you got the impression that dotted final yeh is some kind of
>> foreignism that intruded into Arabic, I think you've been mislead.
>> Dotted final yeh is perfectly ordinary and understood by all literate
>> Arabs.  The evidence is very easy to find; just look at books
>> published in various places in the Arab world.  Or take a look at
>> online newspapers.

It's a recent innovation. Nothing wrong with that. On-line use of dotted
final yeh is most definitely a foreignism - Arab users have no alternative
to date. As a result on-line Qur'ans asre also encoded with final dotted
yehs.

>> The reason for this is easy to see.  The dots provide the essential
>> information needed to establish identity, since the undotted forms
>> are not graphically related (compare medial and iso form of any
>> yeh).  They are just like the other dots used in Arabic: they make
>> it easier to read texts.

It's a spelling simplification which is useful for unvowelled texts. For
vowelled texts, presence or absence of final dots is redundant information.

>> I would bet that 99% of Arabic teachers in the Arab world would say
>> final yeh is properly dotted (unless it means alif).

I bet that 100% of Qur'an scholars would prefer to see the final yeh's
undotted in a mus-haf.

t