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

[Mohammed Yousif <mhdyousif at gmx dot net>]

On Monday 02 January 2006 00:33, Mohammed Yousif wrote:
> On Sunday 01 January 2006 19:26, Thomas Milo wrote:
>
> > I once attested
> > an instance where the "plate" (or BEH archigrapheme) is marked with both
> > two stripes (=dots) above and three stripes (=dots) above. As a result,
> > the phrase /fa athaabahumu l-laahu/ could also be read as /fa ataahumu
> > l-laahu (since only one archigrapheme was - doubly - marked with a total
> > of five stripes, two in red, three in black). Both readings turned out to
> > be eattested the the /mucjam al-qira'aati l-qur'aaniyyأ¤/ published in
> > Kuweit in 1986. Without separate "plate" and "dot pattern" such
> > observations could not be encoded for accurate printing, exchanging
> > between scholars, or searching.
>
> The variation here needs to stay even after encoding using a computer.
>

I think I wasn't clear.

I mean that if you are trying to write a Mushaf with a pen and a paper, you
cannot just "copy" what you see. You need first to know what you are
copying. That's, you copy a Beh as a Beh but you don't copy a plate as
a plate while you don't know what kind of letter is this. Otherwise, it would
be photocopying.

That's the way people copied Masahef before the dots. The writer knew what
he meant first and then used the appropriate shape at that time (without
dots).
He might interpret a Beh as a Teh and then copy it as a Teh (again, without
dots). Another one might interpret that same Beh as a Theh and copy it as
a Theh. The result is two copies which are different than the original one
which is absolutely logical and desirable since after all both of them
intended and wrote a different letter.

The whole issue about encoding text in your computer was to avoid the
"photocopying" act. That is, you must first identify the letter, then encode
it, not blindly encoding something that might mean more than letter.

Afterall, if you cannot read a text you shouldn't be able to encode it.
Instead, you should only be able to photocopy it.

The example you gave (I'm taking your word on it here) means that we
have one word we don't know exactly its letters. So to copy it we have
two solutions:
 - Photocopying it. (blindly, using the same lines and dots)
 - Trying to identify the letter and encoding it as such. If we cannot do
    this then we can still encode them but then this shouldn't be 
    identified as being an Arabic word but rather some "cipher" text that
    needs to be converted to Arabic.

You may argue that the same goes for written text without dots but the
difference is that those who wrote these texts actually *meant* what they
were writing even if it is not clear to the reader, they were writing Arabic
_letters_. But when you encode some ambiguous entities, you are not writing
Arabic anymore, you are writing _cipher_ text.

Anyway, I think I agree with you here. It's only on the philosophical side,
do we disagree (i.e. I don't call them Arabic letters anymore. I call them
Arabic letters only after they have been identified by the _writer/typist_ 
and in that case they need to be converted to Arabic letters' codepoints.
But I do see the need to be able to encode such text).

-- 
Mohammed Yousif
Egypt

"قال قائل منهم إني كان لي قرين. يقول أءنك لمن المصدقين. أءذا متنا وكنا تراباً 
وعظاماً أءنا لمدينون. قال هل أنتم مطلعون. فاطلع فرءاه في سواء الجحيم. قال
تالله إن كدت لتردين. ولولا نعمة ربي لكنت من المحضرين"  (من القرءان الكريم)