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
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