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

["Mete Kural" <metek at touchtonecorp dot com>]

Hello Meor,

From: Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya <meor dot ridzuan at gmail dot com>
>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)?

Well, just understand that alef maksura is simply a grammatical concept and from a purely orthographic perspective you can ignore whether a certain yeh exists within an alef maksura condition or not. That is a matter for the grammarians. For us mere mortals who are trying to simply encode, we already know how the word is spelled and don't necessarily need to exactly understand why it is spelled like that, but just simple encode it right. As clearly stated in the article you forwarded Meor, alef maksura historically was associated with the superscript/small alef that is seated on top of a dotless yeh in final position. The article says that in modern times people started dotting the final yeh (hey Tom, you can think of this as part of the continuum of the "Dottification" trend in Arabic, I guess it has never stopped and continued even till modern times), so when they dotted the final yeh they realized that, hey now that the final yehs have dots it cannot be confused with the dotless final yeh that serves as the seat for alef maksura small/superscript alef. And they decided to remove the superscript/small alef that sits on top of the dotless yeh in alef maksura cases, cause you didn't need it any more since you could still distinguish which case is alef maksura and which case is not. Basically this is a change in preference of how to distinguish between alef maksura and regular yehs. Instead of putting a superscript alef on top of the yeh for alef maksura, let's put dots below the yeh when it is not alef maksura. We can still distinguish it so it still works.

But the lesson from this is that both the yeh seat of the superscript alef maksura and a regular final yeh are still simply "yeh"s. Historically they have been yehs and still they are yehs. So I think ideally the best approach would be to encode both with the same codepoint.

To answer your question, you need to identify the maksura if you are trying to understand why a particular word is spelled that way or this way. You don't need to identify the maksura to do encoding. But if you want to identify what's called "alef maksura", the Mushaf Medinah/Fahd clearly distinguishes the alef maksura cases by either placing the superscript alef on top of the dotless yeh seat or by a fatha/fathatan preceding it and the regular yehs don't have this superscript alef or a fatha/fathatan preceding it, without exceptions I think. Therefore you need not do any further investigation. By the way, can anybody tell me why in the Fahd/Medinah mushaf hudan is spelled without a superscript alef on top of the final yeh but 'alaa has one? Is that because the alef sound at the end of 'alaa is considered to be pronounced longer than hudan (which is pronounced pretty short). 

But anyways there seems to be these two cues that identify the alef maksura case. But as Gregg says, I would recommend you to not think of these cases as alef maksura to not be confused but simply yehs, dotless or not.

>> > 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?

Any other cases of initial/medial dotless yehs other than in combination with hamza or small alef? I don't think so. I think that should be it.

>
>> > 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?

They are grammatical concepts that have impact on how the word is spelled. But you don't need to know the reason why a word is spelled this way or that way, that requires detailed study of Arabic grammar and somtimes history. The dotless yeh with hamza and the small alef are characters, that are impacted by the above mentioned grammatical concepts to cause a word to be spelled this way or that way. For encoding purposes, you already know how it is spelled so you just need to encode it.

And which codepoint to use to encode, I still think that whatever codepoint is used, it is the same codepoint for all these yeh cases. And Farsi yeh indeed seems to be the best fit for this purpose.

This is a post from Roozbeh Pournader (Persian typographer). This discussion is about domain names in Arabic script (as part of a new initiative to have international domain names and not just Basic Latin). They are discussing whether to consider  Arabic Letter Alef Maksura (U+0649), Arabic Letter Yeh (U+064A), and Arabic Letter Farsi Yeh (U+06CC) as one letter in domain names. He talks about the Farsi Yeh here:
http://www.isu.net.sa/archive/ainc-alc/2001-July/000166.html

As you see the domain name people are also cursed by the mess of Yehs in Unicode Arabic.

Regards,
Mete


--
Mete Kural
Touchtone Corporation
714-755-2810
--