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Some hints for beginners trying to "read" Arabic... I mean, trying to split a word into letters.
The long stroke is an L ( ل) when it's
Linked to the next
letter, but it's an #alif ا
otherwise. See figure: the first
two strokes are alifs, and the other two are laam لامs.
A short stroke
(a tooth), depending of the dots it carries, might
be a ب, a ت, a ث, a ن, or a
ي. When dotless, it's a yeah hamzah.
In bad printing and in onscreen small type, the hamza sign will look like a dot
unless you use a magnifier, so the yaa hamza may llook like an N. This is the Arabic equivalent of those Roman sans-serif fonts in which "Torn" looks exactly like "Tom".
-the the Mistery Tooth
In Arabic script a dotless tooth can ONLY be a yeah hamza, and in modern print all yeah hamzas must carry a hamza above, so most tipographies just don't include a dotless tooth and you should never see it in print.
But sometimes you can see in online Arabic a "mystery tooth" with no dots and no hamza.
Increasing font size in your browser, or using a magnifier, you'll see that the tooth is in fact a د. It didn't look like a D at first because the white space after it is just one pixel wide.
However, in real-world written Arabic, even in print,
many people forget the two dots of the yeah
or the hamzah sign of the yeah hamzah. So
a dotless
final yaa# ياء may always be any of the three. In the calligraphic stykes from the East of the Arab world, like Diwani and Roqa and Farsi, dotting a final yeah is unheard of.
Copyright (c) 2001-2009
Jordi Mas Trullenque.
email: jordimastrullenque at gmail dot com
http://purl.oclc.org/net/arabe/comoleer.en.html
Last revised: 2008-04-05
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