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

Mete Kural wrote:

Hello Mete,

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.

Yes; unfortunately we don't have good terminology in this area. In my view it makes sense to view written Arabic as operating on two levels; it's easy to name the levels (surface v. depth), but not the things that live at the levels. The graphic forms ("letters") at the surface usually are identifiable as both full-fledged identifiable graphemes *and* as signs of an underlying deep "character" (i.e. lexically significant) identity. E.g. ba' ب is a form in itself that also denotes a lexical category. In contrast, dottless yeh is a clearly identifiable surface category, but may denote multiple lexical categories.

("Lexical category", for lack of a better term. Meaning, a unit used to construct "words". Maybe I should say "sublexical" or "orthographic" category instead. But the latter isn't suitable, since letters like alef maqsura and teh marbuta are clearly orthographic, but not first-class lexical units. Do you see the terminology problem? The only things I've come up with are ugly neologisms, like "orthosemic" or "ortholexic" or the like.)

So I agree with you in the sense that things shaped like yeh are yeh, but only on the surface (graphemically). I disagree if you mean they all have the same denotation, since it is clear in the tradition that sometimes the yeh form means the lexical category "yeh" and sometimes it means the non-lexical category "alef". And what it means is what counts, not what it looks like.

One of the fundamental flaws in Unicode is that it concentrates on surface orthography. That's great for languages that only need surface orthography (like English or Chinese), but in my view it is not a good model for languages like Arabic that operate on two levels. It's a design decision: pick a surface encoding design, and you exclude crucial semantic information from the text; pick an encoding that focusses on underlying lexical categories and you only have to worry about mapping to graphemes. For my money the latter is a much better approach.

... 

<<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.

Thus eliminating information from encoded text. Why would this be a good thing? Lexical yeh (for lack of a better term) and dotless yeh look alike but denote completely different things; why conflate them?

... 

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.

It had never occurred to me before, probably because when I learned Arabic all the examples were contemporary; I don't recall the small alif ever being written. We just learned "alef maqsura" by rote.

. 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.

Well, al-Nahw al-Wafy talks about maqsur *nouns*, and Wright doesn't (or if he does I haven't found it). But the latter mentions alef maqsura in the context of talking about the letters, whereas I haven't found any mention of it in the former (4 volumes, about 800 pages each - I can't say it isn't in there somewhere.) So the notion of a maqsur with respect to nouns is clear (and can be found in classical works of Quranic i'rab), but the naming of the letter remains a minor mystery to me. Maybe it's simply graphical, and refers to the length of the graphically shortened alif above the yeh form.


<<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..

My latest speculation is that they just needed something graphically distinct to put at the end of the word. But also, it may be that they classified the sounds of yeh and alif together - there's a little essay about the letters at the beginning of my copy of Lisaan al-Arab that makes that sound maybe kinda possible.

-gregg