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

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

Mete Kural wrote:
>> Gregg Reynolds wrote:
>>
>>> Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> I wasn't even aware of this.  :)  It's exactly what is needed, not
>>> only for Quranic text, but for ordinary print - in Egypt especially
>>> it is common for printed text to omit the two dots of a final ya,
>>> as in the word "fi" (في = فى).  With this (misnamed) codepoint you
>>> get to desired graphical representation while retaining the
>>> semantics of ya.  But you don't want to use it everywhere - the
>>> dotless ya of ila ٌٌإلى and the dotless ya of fi فى are not the
>>> same semantically.

Indeed. In fact, using a Locale system, the difference between Farsi Yeh and
Arabic Yeh evaporates.

>> Yes, grammatically they are not the same - one is alef maksura, one
>> is yeh proper, but orthographically they are both a yeh. So I think
>> the same codepoint should be used for both. As far as I remember,
>> Farsi Yeh turns out to be the most appropriate character to encode
>> this most yehs in the Qur'an including the above two, despite the
>> name misnomer. Right Tom? Indeed what is called Farsi Yeh is a
>> Classical Arabic Yeh, but perhaps not completely so. I am curious,
>> do you guys know whether a Farsi Yeh is supposed to loose its dots
>> when a "hamza above" follows it?

This is indeed the case. Middle Yeh has either 1. no dots 2. two dots below
3. hamza above ( and conditionally below in recent Cairo/Medina spelling)

>> If so, then the Farsi Yeh might
>> truly be a Classical Arabic Yeh, hence a Qur'anic Arabic Yeh. If it
>> doesn't loose its dots when a "hamza above" follows it then it is
>> partially a Classical Arabic Yeh. But it still seems like the best
>> choice for Qur'an Yehs among all the other mess of Yehs in Unicode
>> Arabic.

This is brilliant. Yeh (any folkloristic variant) followed by superscript
hamza loses its dots. This eleminates at least one more another bizarrre
Unicode Yeh variant.

>> One thing to clarify, in Classical Arabic, "orthographically" (not
>> grammatically), the initial and medial proper yehs, the final yehs,
>> the yehs that are the chair of hamza, all of them, are simply a
>> "yeh". Grammarians have given them different names based on their
>> grammatical context, but orthographically speaking, they should all
>> be considered a Yeh. If Farsi Yeh really fulfills the promise of
>> handling all these contexual instance of Yeh in Classical Arabic
>> fairly, then it may truly be the Classical Arabic Yeh that we are
>> desperately looking for.

This includes of course alef maqsura written with yaa'.

Regards,

t