Re: Hebrew with Arabic-like pointing

> (Ex.: The /p/ sound—ordinarily written as פּ *peʾ-daghesh* in regular
> Hebrew—must be written as a ב *beth* having 3 upwards dots above in,
> let’s say, Juhuri—due to the influence of the Arabic-Farsi letter پ *paʾ*.
> It’s because the /p/ sound in Arabic is an allophone of the /b/ sound,
> so—it takes a letter from Farsi to faithfully represent /p/!).
>

I'm with you in that I think standardization is always desirable.
Historical practice though is different (after all, not using an
established orthography is already a form of transcription, or invention if
you like), plus there are at least two common systems of Arabic diacritics:
the Persian/Urdu one and the Jawi script, which incidentally use different
diacritics for [p].

Also there is the case described here:

    http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5

I don't know whether the name is Javanese (right now I'm assuming so) and I
am surprised that they would use Arabic script on a Singaporean identity
card, but here the Arabic letter f is used for [p] (which works if this is
Javanese, because it has no [f]-phoneme).

(Or maybe Jawi [p] wasn't available, so that's why they used letter f here.)

Anyways, just drawing attention to the diversity.

Stephan
Received on Tue Sep 25 2012 - 22:17:12 CDT