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

[Mete Kural <metekural at yahoo dot com>]

----- Original Message ----
From: heer <heer at u dot washington dot edu>
<<Perhaps one is actually searching a text of the 
Qur'an in modern spelling which is somehow linked to the traditional 
spelling.>>

I think a good approach to tackle this problem is to use a combination of Qur'anic-to-modern spelling conversion algorithm and lookup tables (for the most exceptional cases). Meor, unfortunately, as Heer points to it, simple text searching on a properly encoded Qur'an with original Qur'anic spellings rather than modern ones won't be adequate for efficient searching, since Arab audiences and perhaps others will usually type the words in modern spelling (ex: type kitaab with an alef and expect search results with kitaab without an alef as it is spelled in the Qur'an). I know you can do this in Harf's Holy Quran and it works pretty well. I am not sure how Harf does it in the Holy Qur'an software but I think they might be using the algorithm+lookup_table approach. Anyways, the point is that simple text searching unfortunately won't be enough for useful Qur'an searching for the masses anyways, so the search mechanism will have to be some kind of "smart" search.

Regards,
Mete