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

[Mete Kural <metekural at yahoo dot com>]

Hi Gregg,

<<Maybe I'm not understanding Mete, but I don't see how this could work at 
all.  Aside from the semantics I've mentioned in another post, Farsi yeh 
takes dots in initial and medial forms, no?  So how can it be the seat 
of a hamza or a small alif in those contexts?>>

In a previous post I was asking if anybody knew whether the Farsi yeh is necessarily defined to take dots in initial and medial form "in combination with a hamza above/below or small alef". I think Tom implied something to the effect that it isn't necessarily defined that way. If Farsi yeh isn't necessarily defined to take dots "in combination with a hamza above/below or small alef", then the font developer could implement it not to take dots when used in combination with a hamza above/below or small alef. Practically speaking, if Farsi yeh wants to be the true classical Arabic yeh, then it should not take those dots in combination with hamza above/below or small alef. First of all, in Farsi text when you encounter a word that has hamza above/below or small alef on top of yeh seat - such words would be borrowings from Arabic - the yeh never has dots. Second of all, it would look idiotic for a yeh to have dots when used in combination with hamza above/below or small alef. Why would anyone want that? Certainly not Farsi users.

Got to try it with a high quality Arabic font and find out whether Farsi yeh when used in combination with hamza above/below or small alef takes dots or not. I wonder how currently existing high quality Arabic fonts implement this.

Thanks,
Mete

----- Original Message ----
From: Gregg Reynolds <gar at arabink dot com>
To: General Arabization Discussion <general at arabeyes dot org>
Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2005 8:10:44 PM
Subject: Re: Questions about yeh, hamzah on yeh, alef maksura and dotless ba

Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya wrote:
> Mete,
> 
> I think your solution is lacking one thing: we can't tell where is 
> alef maksura . Other than that, I don't have any problem. BTW, why is
>  it important to have normalization?
> 

Hi again,

As I see it, normalization will make various kinds of text handling 
(esp. search) easier.  For example, if hamza is always encoded as a 
distinct codepoint (i.e. never use 622/623/624/625/626) then obviously 
searching for hamza is easy.  That's good, because the seat of the hamza 
has (in general) no semantic significance - it's the hamza that counts. 
  But if you want to search for a particular seat, that's easy too - 
search for the seat codepoint (627/648/649) followed by hamza.  To find 
a final dotless-yeh-qua-alef, just search for 649 followed by a word 
separator.

> 
>> My recommendation is to convert all yehs - alef maqsuras, yeh seats
>> of hamza, yeh seats of small alef, regular yehs, final dotless yehs
>> - to Farsi yeh. Searching is no problem. Here is the algorithm:
>> 
Maybe I'm not understanding Mete, but I don't see how this could work at 
all.  Aside from the semantics I've mentioned in another post, Farsi yeh 
takes dots in initial and medial forms, no?  So how can it be the seat 
of a hamza or a small alif in those contexts?

-gregg


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