From: Khaled Hosny (khaledhosny@eglug.org)
Date: Fri Dec 21 2007 - 07:57:15 CST
On Fri, Dec 21, 2007 at 01:09:22PM +0100, arno wrote:
> Khaled Hosny wrote:
>> It is also noted that the behaviour of hamza not breaking joinable
>> letters is now restricted to Quranic text (and may be other historical
>> texts?), so it is safe to consider it a different character. The same
>> goes with Farsi yeh (U+06CC) Vs. Arabic yeh (U+064A), while both are
>> exactly the same character with the only difference is that Arabic yeh
>> has dots in the final/isolated forms, old Arabic texts (and modern
>> Egyptian) assume the same behaviour as what Unicode calls Farsi yeh.
>
>
> I do not understand.
> Unicode has five different chars:
> yeh
> Frasi yeh
> Alef Maksura
> yeh with hamza above
> yeh barree
> Leaving aside that the names are not correct,
> each of them as a well defined behaviour:
> two dots in all form positions,
> two dots only in initial and middle,
> no dots ever,
> no dots but hamza above,
> two dots only in initial and middle position.
>
> What is the problem?
>
The fact that all (except yeh with hamza above) are stylistic variations
of the same character, Arabic ya' always have dots in initial and medial
forms, usually lose its dots in final and isolated forms (both are seen
in old manuscripts, but the dotted form is less common), and always lose
its dots with hamza above. Alef maksura is usually undistinguished from
ya'. So, there is nothing as ya' with final dots and ya' without, all
are the same ya' with mere stylistic variations. Even the retroflex ya'
(yeh barre) is a variation of the regular ya' used by calligraphers on
artistic basis with no different semantics (I don't know if it has a
different meaning than regular ya' in Urdu).
-- Khaled
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