2011/8/20 mmarx <[email protected]>: > In the Qur'an the hamza is not always above: > if there is kasra on the letter, the hamza > is below too. > > Is there someone preparing a proposal for > missing Quranic characters or should one > do it one by one?
I was told long ago that the normative placement of kasra below the letter was also requiring it to go below the shadda (above the letter) when there was one, and this suffered no exception, at least in Koranic texts: the shadda effectively modifies the consonnant, not the vowel, and defines the new higher baseline of the consonnant cluster, under which the kasra is simply position So the case is similar here, going in the reverse direction for the placement of hamza, relative to kasra that logically comes after the hamza and that may be omitted if vowel precision is not needed. Both exceptions are highly related to the logical order of binding for those hamza and shadda diacritics. The rule relative to the shadda is so strong that this is even one of the very first thing you're taught in some didactic tutorials on how to read Arabic. An example here, in the first lesson (redacted for French learners, with audio description, and videos showing how to manually draw the glyphs, with just three simple consonnants, the 3 basic short vowels, the sukun as a mark for vowelless, and the shadda for gemination, and the 3 basic long vowels represented using a mandatory matres lectionis, after the optional short vowel on the previous consonnant): http://www.e-apprendrearabe.com/member/index.php?page=lecon1 Then the rule for the placement of kasra relative to shadda is constantly used in all the 12 lessons, in a systematic list of syllables, as well as in sample words explained completely, and in longer lists of words left as an exercice to the reader (there are a few minor errors in this web version, which you can correct easily even if you're a beginner). That's one of the free initiations to Arabic writing I've found on the web that is the easiest to understand and memoize rapidly (in about 15-30 minutes per lesson, you can hear/pronounce and read/write correctly almost all the Arabic script, at least phonetically, even if you don't know the vocaculary and grammar and you're a complete beginner to the script and language). This last method looks to me even much simpler than the one I had to use years ago (with lot of difficulties because I could not have the pronunciation, reading and writing rules all at the same time)... And it is definitely simpler to understand than the complex introduction to the Arabic script given in the Unicode standard (which immediately formulates the joining behavior of Arabic letters, in a way that looks much more complicate than necessary, but still forgets some essential things about the 5 basic diacritics). Yes the case of hamza is tricky, that's why these lessons above do not enter in its details (these are left to the advanced lessons after this initiation, only available on paid subscription). For the same reason, there's nothing in this initiation about the variants of other consonnant letters, turned into small diacritics used in Koranic texts to annotate the correct reading or interpretation, where some basic letters are not written in texts that are not fully pointed. -- Philippe.
