Re: Quranic Proposal - So we're discussion German now.. :-)

[Mete Kural <metekural at yahoo dot com>]

Salaamun Aleykum Mohammed,

So we are discussing German now? ... :-)

Right now unfortunately I don't have the time to
respond to your other inquiries (tomorrow insha'Allah)
but I will briefly respond to your comments about
German.

>  It's still the same letter with the same name and
> the same meaning.

>   No, the German alphabet has 26 letters, the
> umlauts are not
>   counted.

>  But Arabic has 28 alphabets so the comparison is
> not valid at all
>  A Beh is not like a Teh in anyway (a Beh is read
> "B" and a Teh is read "T"
>  so the difference is not only the meaning but also
> the pronouncation)

I speak German myself (not a native speaker though).
Yes I know that the umlaut letters are not part of the
German alphabet. But this does not mean that they are
not graphemes. As you know very well neither "taa
marbuta" nor "hamza" is part of the 28-letter Arabic
alphabet, but this does not mean that taa marbuta and
hamza are not graphemes, they are. They make a
difference in the meaning, they carry a phonemic load.
Could you say that taa marbuta is simply a variation
of the letter heh? Of course not (except if you are a
Farsi speaker perhaps :-) ...). They are different
letters (graphemes), although they share the same
archi-grapheme (the base skeleton).

In German whether you use the regular vowel or an
umlaut vowel can change the meaning of the word. For
example, if you want to say "we could do that," in the
sense of "we were able to," then you use "wir konnten"
(no umlaut). But if you mean it in the sense of "we
might be able to" or "it's a possibility," then you
must say, "wir könnten" (the subjunctive form, with an
umlaut, based on the past tense form).

And this is just German. In my native language
Turkish, the umlauts generally cause even a greater
difference in the meaning. For example if you say
'kup' it means 'cup', if you say 'küp' it means
'cube', if you say 'göl' it means 'lake', if you say
'gol' it means 'goal'. And in fact in Turkish, the
umlaut characters ü and ö are part of the alphabet
also. I hope you get my point.

>  And yes, it's like the sequential fathatan (it's
> even a vowel).
>  Anyway, even if I'm wrong here, the Unicode code
> charts are
>  full of such characters.

I hope you understand that the umlauts are not like
the sequential fathatan by now. They belong to a
different category. While the regular vowels vs.
umlaut vowels cause a difference in the phonemic load
of the word the regular fathatan vs. the sequential
fathatan does not cause a difference in phonemic load
of the word. But it does cause a difference in the
"phonetic" load of the word, therefore it needs to be
somehow distinguished from regular fathatan in the
plain text and supported by Unicode. Our difference
lies in how this should be done.

Kind regards,
Mete