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

["Thomas Milo" <t dot milo at chello dot nl>]

Gregg Reynolds wrote:
>> For me the moral of the story is that written Arabic has always been
>> tremendously flexible.  You can see this most obviously in the
>> freedom with which calligraphers place their letters vertically,
>> especially at the left margin.  But also in use of dots.  In a few
>> places at the Jafet site I found examples of "fy" في without *any*
>> dots, not even on the feh.  Seems reasonable to me; it would be
>> pretty hard to confuse the shape في with anything else, so why
>> bother with the dots?  I suspect pragmatism is the general rule
>> historically: if dots (or diacritics) are needed to disambiguate,
>> use 'em, otherwise they're optional: "Calligrapher's Choice".
>> "Corrrectness" (I speculate) has been more about i'rab, grammar,
>> etc. and hasn't bothered much about letterforms. But who knows?

Hi Gregg,

This is exactly why I think Unicode misrepresents Arabic, or at least
historical Arabic: There the dots are just as optional as vowels and should
consequently be allotted their own unicode points. This would give the
researcher the precision he needs. The present offering with various dotless
letters is a nice visual placebo, but makes no sense logically: "hey, is
this a dotless noon, a dotless yeh or a dotless beh? - or, "is this a
dotless feh or a dotless qaf?"...

Best wishes for the New Year.

t