Abi Lover wrote:
>> From: Ali Khanban <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>
>> It seems to me that these are all different shapes of one letter
>> <hamza>. But <heh+hamza above> is a mixture of two letters: <heh> and
>> a transformed <yeh>. It is not even a ligature, because it is not
>> supposed to be handled by font to write <heh+hamza above> instead of
>> ><heh and yeh>.
>>
>> Abi Lover wrote:
>
>
> Letter forms like <vav + hamzeh> or <alef + hamzeh> are
> representations of TWO sounds and letters, a vowel, plus what
> linguists call a "glottal stop", which is represented by the hamzeh.
> Linguists have traditionally transliterated this glottal stop in the
> Latin script with an inverted comma {'}. Actually, the sound it
> represents is more often a glottal plosive than a glottal stop. In a
> word like <mo'men>, it is a glottal stop; but in a word like <mas'ul>,
> it is a glottal plosive. In the English language, this glottal stop
> (or rather plosive) occurs only at the beginning of words which begin
> with a vowel, like {a,e,i,o,u}, therefore it is not represented by a
> separate character. it is taken for granted. But in Arabic and Farsi,
> because it can also occur in the middle and at the end of words, it
> needs to be represented by a special character of its own. It is in
> fact a fully fledged consonant, and has its own distinct sound and
> alphabetical representation in the language. Thus it is not correct to
> say that all these different letter forms are "different shapes of one
> letter <hamzeh>". They are representations of different vowels plus
> the glottal stop. <vav + hamzeh> is a representation of the vowels {o}
> or {u}, plus the glottal stop or plosive. In <mo'men>, the glottal
> stop occurs after the vowel; in <mas'ul>, the glottal plosive occurs
> before the vowel. But in both cases, the shape represents a
> combination of the two.
I am not agree with you in your conclusion. Again I insist that there is
a letter called <hamza> in Arabic and it is used in Farsi as you
described. But the fact is that this is one letter with different shapes
according to the sound and place of it in the word. In <mo'men> we can't
say that <vav+hamza> sounds as <o + stop>, because there is an <o> which
is not written, as we always omit them. And because of that <o>, the
letter <hamza> is written on a base shaped as <vav>. Linguistically, in
a word like <mo'akkad>, we have:
<m> a consonant
<o> a vowel (is not written)
<hamza> a consonant (is written on a base like the letter vav>
<a> a vowel (is not written)
<k> a consonant
<k> a consonant (is changed to tashdid)
<a> a vowel (is not written)
<d> a consonant.
<hamza> is a letter with different shapes. These shapes are not always
the same in Farsi and Arabic. For example, in Farsi we use a shape
<dandaneh> for <hamza> in <pangu'an> which would be a shape like <vav>
if we had used the Arabic style.
Best
-khanban-
________________________________________________________________
|| |||| Ali Asghar Khanban
|| || Research Associate in Department of Computing
||||||| Imperial College of Sci, Tech & Med, London SW7 2BZ, UK
|| Tel +44 (20) 7594 8241 Fax: +1 (509) 694 0599
||||||| [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~khanban
________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________
FarsiWeb mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
