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

[Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya <meor dot ridzuan at gmail dot com>]

Greg,

> I'm not sure what this means, but if it means equating a final ya qua
> consonant or kasra lengthener with a final ya qua alif maksura it would
> colossally stupid.  Which means, if Unicode has anything to do with it,
> that it will probably be adopted.

I'm just posting their finding about alef maksura from the body. Just
ignore their recomendation.

>
> My advice is to forget you ever heard the words "alef maksura".  It is
> totally a red herring.  What I have mentioned previous posts is only the
> tip of the iceberg.  The grammatical concept involved is in fact very
> hairy and subtle, and has little if anything to do with letter forms and
> a whole lot to do with traditional grammatical analysis.  It gets into
> arcane matters of actual v. virtual declension, inflection, etc.  You
> don't want to know, believe me.  Just worry about dotted v. dotless ya
> *forms*.

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

> > 1. List of common words that uses alef maksura and how it changes when
> > combine  with suffixes/prefixes.
>
> That's easy; but what do you mean by "alef maksura"?  ;)  Ya form or
> alif form?  Technically only nouns of certain classes are maqsura; e.g.
> فتى، هدى، رضا etc.  By contrast, verbs and particles that seem to be
> maqsura are not, e.g. إلى، على، لدى، دعا، سعى etc.  Also إذا and ما are
> not maqsura.  (Of course, it depends on which Grammarian you listen to;
> this info is from the standard - and encyclopedic - النحو الوافي vol. 1.)
>
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)?

> > 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?


> > 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?

Regards.