Re: Pashto yeh characters

From: CE Whitehead (cewcathar@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Jul 28 2010 - 15:38:36 CDT

  • Next message: CE Whitehead: "RE: Pashto yeh characters"

    From: linguist@artstein.org
    Date: Tue Jul 27 2010 - 23:51:36 CDT

    > Hi Kamal,

    > Thanks for the helpful comment -- especially the URLs. A quick check
    > showed that at least on the BBC, U+064A and U+06CC are used
    > interchangeably, even in final position where the glyphs differ. My
    > Pashto is extremely weak, but even I can recognize that in the
    > following article, both 06A9 0631 0632 06CC (in the headline) and 06A9
    > 0631 0632 064A (in the first line of text) spell the name of the
    > Afghan president.

    > http://www.bbc.co.uk/pashto/afghanistan/2010/04/100411_hh-kandahar-clash.shtml
    Thanks for this.

     

    > I'm still a bit flummoxed as to how a single writer can produce U+064A
    and U+06CC in such an apparently random fashion, given that they
    > require distinct keystrokes.
    > . . .

     

    > On a similar note, it didn't take me too long to find an article where
    > the word "Pentagon" had two variants for the "g" character -- U+06AB
    > in the headline, U+06AF in the first line of text.

    > http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5842070,00.html

    > In my Afghan Pashto keyboard layout, these characters are ' and
    > option+' respectively. Are the Deutsche Welle typists randomly
    > pressing option when typing gaf?

    > (These are intended as rhetorical questions, but if someone has an
    > answer I'd be happy to hear.)

    > -Ron.
    Hi, I would guess that Kamal probably has the right answer in this case;

    myself I know nothing about Pashto, but only a bit about Arabic;

    'g' is a non-Arabic sound (Arabic has a velar fricative and a voiceless velar stop but not a voiced velar stop -- the "velar" sounds are all made near the back of the mouth but not deep in the throat) and there is no "g" in Standard Arabic although there are two ways to write it, using two different letters -- the kaf character is one option and apparently variants of that character are used to indicate the g-sound in Pashto from what you said;

     

    This Pashto site seems to prefer kaf with two circles for indicating "g":
     
    http://learningpashto.wordpress.com/

     

    For the U06CC U06DD see:

    http://learningpashto.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/pashto-specific-letters/

     

    Best,

    C. E. Whitehead
    cewcathar@hotmail.com

                                                   



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