Gregg Reynolds wrote: >> FYI, this may be true historically, but in my opinion it is not >> especially relevant. Today final yeh (with yeh semantics) is dotted >> virtually everywhere in the Arab world. Egypt is the major >> exception, but even in Egypt use of dotted final yeh is commmon (see >> the official newspaper of Egypt at >> http://www.ahram.org.eg/Index.asp?CurFN=fron1.htm&DID=8715).
So is Iraq. >> If you got the impression that dotted final yeh is some kind of >> foreignism that intruded into Arabic, I think you've been mislead. >> Dotted final yeh is perfectly ordinary and understood by all literate >> Arabs. The evidence is very easy to find; just look at books >> published in various places in the Arab world. Or take a look at >> online newspapers. It's a recent innovation. Nothing wrong with that. On-line use of dotted final yeh is most definitely a foreignism - Arab users have no alternative to date. As a result on-line Qur'ans asre also encoded with final dotted yehs. >> The reason for this is easy to see. The dots provide the essential >> information needed to establish identity, since the undotted forms >> are not graphically related (compare medial and iso form of any >> yeh). They are just like the other dots used in Arabic: they make >> it easier to read texts. It's a spelling simplification which is useful for unvowelled texts. For vowelled texts, presence or absence of final dots is redundant information. >> I would bet that 99% of Arabic teachers in the Arab world would say >> final yeh is properly dotted (unless it means alif). I bet that 100% of Qur'an scholars would prefer to see the final yeh's undotted in a mus-haf. t
_______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/general
