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

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

Mohammed Yousif wrote:
> I would suggest that one codepoint be used for all Yeh needs.

Absolutely.

> But if someone needs the dots on the final shape that would require
> us to see what these dots mean:
>  - If they are to identify the Yeh (like all other dots), then it's
>    only a different style for writting the Yeh.

Spot on. Moreover, the calligraphic alternative of Yeh that bends the tail
to the right, traditionally always gets dots, whether it is /calae/ or
calii/.

>  - If they are to identify the "e" sound Yeh not like the rest of
>    dots, then I really don't know how this should be handled because
>    these two dots in this context can not be considered part of the
>    final shape of the letter Yeh since they add more information to
>    the already known letter Yeh and that's not the scope of dots in
>    Arabic. Maybe in that case U+064A should be used as a Yeh
>    specialization, but then I wouldn't like that solution.

What kind of use are you referring to?

>> Now what about the situation of classic materials
>> (not limited to Qur'aan)? In the relevant era, is it always the case
>> that hamza or small alif are acutually written with dotless yeh,
>> while ini/mid yeh which represents "y" consonant has two dots?
>
> for the Mushaf (written Qur'an text), it's always the case, maybe
> because Yeh is the only letter that Hamza can sit on, so the dots
> are not needed here.

The word /stay'asuw/ in Q12:80 is rather a spanner in the works: its
existence implies that there can be no rule that the sequence Yeh, Hamza can
be trusted to be Yeh+Hamza_above/below.

Meor's present encoding of this transparent Hamza as U+0640 TATWEEL. U+0654
SUPERSCRIPT HAMZA is IMHO untenable from both a linguistic and calligraphic
point of view: tatweel is not a grapheme (i.e., not part of any
orthography), and it is totally font and calligraphy dependant. It happens
to be used in such positions by the recent Egyptian and Saudi editions, but
a robust encoding and rendering solution should not depend on ad hoc such
innovations. I prefer to encode this hamz as U+0621 and then make sure the
hamza is positioned between the surrounding characters rather that on top of
the first one - without having to resort to a tatweel.

>> Are there no
>> occurrence of "unwritten hamza" with dotless yeh? (If I remember
>> correctly, hamza is invented later by headhunting `ain.)
>
> Only in classical manuscripts that were written before the Hamza and
> the dots. Even the Qur'an is now written in Masahef using Hamza.
>
>>
>> By the way, does anyone know this? I know "alif saghiirah" means the
>> small alif. Are there direct translation of "dagger alif" in Arabic?
>> I once guessed that since it resembles to dagger sign which indicates
>> footnote, the word "dagger alif" was coined by a european
>> orientalist...
>>
> "dagger alif" or in Arabic "Alef Khengariya" is the most popular name
> for the shape used by Small Alef in the Mushaf among all Qur'an
> scholars but it is
> a rather shape-oriented name :-)
> ألف خنجرية

The superscript alef looks more like Roman The undersigned "orientalist" was
recently honoured with a khanjar, but it didn't look at all like an alef -
unless you consider it the mirror image of the old Kufi alef...

www.decotype.com/movies/100_1940.JPG
www.decotype.com/movies/100_1942.JPG

Best wishes for the new CE year,

t