Salaamun Aleykum Mohammed, So we are discussing German now? ... :-)
Right now unfortunately I don't have the time to respond to your other inquiries (tomorrow insha'Allah) but I will briefly respond to your comments about German. > It's still the same letter with the same name and > the same meaning. > No, the German alphabet has 26 letters, the > umlauts are not > counted. > But Arabic has 28 alphabets so the comparison is > not valid at all > A Beh is not like a Teh in anyway (a Beh is read > "B" and a Teh is read "T" > so the difference is not only the meaning but also > the pronouncation) I speak German myself (not a native speaker though). Yes I know that the umlaut letters are not part of the German alphabet. But this does not mean that they are not graphemes. As you know very well neither "taa marbuta" nor "hamza" is part of the 28-letter Arabic alphabet, but this does not mean that taa marbuta and hamza are not graphemes, they are. They make a difference in the meaning, they carry a phonemic load. Could you say that taa marbuta is simply a variation of the letter heh? Of course not (except if you are a Farsi speaker perhaps :-) ...). They are different letters (graphemes), although they share the same archi-grapheme (the base skeleton). In German whether you use the regular vowel or an umlaut vowel can change the meaning of the word. For example, if you want to say "we could do that," in the sense of "we were able to," then you use "wir konnten" (no umlaut). But if you mean it in the sense of "we might be able to" or "it's a possibility," then you must say, "wir k�nnten" (the subjunctive form, with an umlaut, based on the past tense form). And this is just German. In my native language Turkish, the umlauts generally cause even a greater difference in the meaning. For example if you say 'kup' it means 'cup', if you say 'k�p' it means 'cube', if you say 'g�l' it means 'lake', if you say 'gol' it means 'goal'. And in fact in Turkish, the umlaut characters � and � are part of the alphabet also. I hope you get my point. > And yes, it's like the sequential fathatan (it's > even a vowel). > Anyway, even if I'm wrong here, the Unicode code > charts are > full of such characters. I hope you understand that the umlauts are not like the sequential fathatan by now. They belong to a different category. While the regular vowels vs. umlaut vowels cause a difference in the phonemic load of the word the regular fathatan vs. the sequential fathatan does not cause a difference in phonemic load of the word. But it does cause a difference in the "phonetic" load of the word, therefore it needs to be somehow distinguished from regular fathatan in the plain text and supported by Unicode. Our difference lies in how this should be done. Kind regards, Mete _______________________________________________ General mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/general
