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

[Mete Kural <metekural at yahoo dot com>]

Hi Gregg,

<<----- Original Message ----
From: Gregg Reynolds <gar at arabink dot com>
Alif maqsura is a concept; dotless yeh is a form.  In a sense it is not 
a full-fledged character, in that, like teh marbuta, it doesn't have 
first-class lexical status.  It's more a kind of visual aid to the 
reader.  I'm referring here to dotless-yeh-as-alif, not 
dotless-yeh-as-yeh.>>

In 7th century and earlier Arabic the dotless yeh that represented what is commonly referred to as alef maqsura indeed gives the impression that a full-fledged character. After the analysis of age of Arabic grammarians this yeh was seperately categorized which gave the impression that it does not have lexical status. The fact is that in 7th century and earlier Arabic when there were no superscript alefs or hamzas these yehs were just yehs. At that time, you could think of yeh as a multi-purpose character, sometimes it takes the roll of a consonant, sometimes an 'i' vowel and sometimes an 'a' vowel. Actually the same is true for wow in the 7th century. Please take not of the word Al-Salaat الصلاة this is how we spell the word today. But in the Qur'an it is spelled  الصلوة as we know. Similar to how yeh takes the function of an 'a' vowel in 'ala, here wow takes the function of an 'a' vowel. Somehow this kind of usage of wow largely dissappeared in later Arabic, but the function of yeh as 'a' vowel survived. So the "alef maqsura" situation is actually not unique to just yeh, also wow. In any case, neither the yeh nor the wow could really be considered a less-than-full character back then. They were simply multi-purpose characters. And this is quite usual habit for Arabic since Arabic has several multi-purpose characters.

<<So we have (at least) four encoding candidates:

    1. this funny alif-in-dotless-yeh-clothing (Quranic and contemporary);
    2. a dotless-yeh *form* that has no meaning and is used solely as a 
seat of hamza/small alef/etc. (Quranic and contemporary)
    3. a true yeh that sometimes loses its spots (Quranic and occasionally 
contemporary);
    4. a true yeh that always keeps its dots (contemporary usage)>>

This is why I think the best approach would be to encode all four of these cases with the same yeh codepoint.

<<Eureka!!  Goodness, it just occurred to me why final dotless yeh is 
commonly referred to as alef.  Maybe it is because originally (and still 
in the Quran) it was always the seat of small alif.  Since it always 
implied the small alif without exception, people eventually just stopped 
writing the small alif but kept calling the dotless yeh "alef".  In 
other words, what they really mean is "the unwritten small alif implied 
by the dotless yeh".  In that case, items 1 and 2 above are the same 
case: dotless yeh that serves purely as a graphical aid to readers.  No 
direct phonological semantics; in particular it does not *directly* mean 
the sound /a/ under this interpretation, but rather signals indirectly 
the presence of an unwritten following alif as well as a (possibly 
unwritten) preceding fatha.  I don't know if that's what actually 
happened, but it works and it sure sounds like good folk etymology.  ;)>>

<<As for "maqsur": I was under the impression that this dotless-yeh 
"meant" that an alif sound is shortened (maqsur);  this is the 
explanation given in the standard English language Grammar of Arabic 
(Wright), which says al-alif al-maqsura is "the alif that can be 
abbreviated".  But given the explanation in al-Nahw al-Wafy (which is 
much more thorough and subtle than anything in Wright), it makes more 
sense to think that the shortening refers not to the alif itself, but to 
the cutting-off of the case-ending vowels.  It is the entire word that 
is shortened, since the case-ending vowels are considered to be there in 
some real sense, but are virtual and not pronounced - they get cut off, 
in a sense.  So the alif is not abbreviated as per Wright, but merely 
not extended by other vowels.  Wright makes no connection between maqsur 
and declension (إعراب), but that's the whole point according to al-Nahw 
al-Wafy.  BTW, similar considerations apply for "mamduud"; in al-Nahw 
al-Wafy it's the *word* that is lengthened by an *extra* alif followed 
by hamza, whereas Wright claims it is a matter of "protecting" the 
length of the alif with the trailing hamza.  It's looking to me like 
maybe Wright completely missed the boat on this one.>>

Somehow I have thought that they came up with the name alef maqsura as originally intended for the superscript alef that goes on top of the yeh seat and not the seat itself; similar to alef qasiir. But anyways, that was just a subconcious guess.. I wonder why al-Nahw al-Wafy and Wright say different things here.. Maybe checking the history of the naming of alef maqsura would solve the puzzle.

<<The question remains as to why they chose dotless yeh to carry the small 
alif, instead of some other graphical convention.>>

Well, actually there was no small alef to begin with as you may know. There was the dotless yeh and the small alef was later put on it. Maybe a more interesting question is how Arabic orthography evolved in the 5th and 6th centuries such that a yeh was used for the 'a' vowel sound. I thought the choice of yeh was a consequence of Arabic grammar rules but my Arabic grammar is not strong enough to point to what rule it would be..

Regards,
Mete