RE: Case mapping of dotless lowercase letters

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Dec 18 2003 - 10:10:22 EST

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    Peter Kirk wrote:
    > Yes, but these rules apply strictly only to suffixes. Most words of
    > Turkic origin also follow them internally, but loan words do not.
    > "Millî" is a loan word from Arabic and so not bound by the vowel harmony
    > rules. But Arabic does not have the dotless i sound and so both i's must
    > be dotted. As the latter corresponds to a long Arabic vowel it is often
    > written with a circumflex.

    Is the circumflex convention standardized in Turkish romanization of
    Arabic words?
    Aren't there cases where long dotted vowels would be simply written
    twice like in "Millii" instead of "Millî", exhibiting the fact that
    the Arabic dotted-i sound must be long, without implying a Turkic
    adjectival dotted "-li"?

    > This also serves to distinguish this word from the noun "mil"
    > (3 meanings: pivot; silt; mile) with the adjectival suffix "-li"
    > (not "-li" here because of vowel harmony); but "mil" + "-li" is
    > rare and the spelling "milli" is much more commonly a variant
    > of "millî".

    Thanks for this linguistic precision.

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