Talk:Hamza
Writing systems B‑class Low‑importance | ||||||||||
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hamza is my name —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.151.21.208 (talk) 23:24, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
--182.187.49.193 (talk) 15:58, 9 December 2013 (UTC)Hamza
Hamza's Shape?
Wow... good comments up to this point. My question is on the sole citation of William Wright up to this point, in the beginning where the origin of hamza is implicitly or briefly discussed. Due to essentially an overflow from a debate on the discussion page of Middle Bronze Age alphabets, this has kind of become relevant. I am not suggesting that a templated 'origins' page be added to each letter, as this would create significant controversy in determining single creation myths for each letter.
I am wondering two things (if people strongly disagree please revert this) a) is William Wright the best source - particularly since better sources are available - his work is more than a hundred years old and there has been some scholarship in the meantime (which is at the bottom of the article, granted); b) the reference is misleading. On page 15, in the orthography of hamza, Wright (http://books.google.com.eg/books?id=iFcqj6Oua8cC&dq=Wright%27s+grammar+of+the+arabic+language&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=2ZG286OIsO&sig=aKJkJfXIZ_l1TEkZGsOH-uulRts&hl=ar&ei=Eli8StTkIuKfjAfVn8msCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=hamza&f=false) describes in Rem B that sometimes the hamza in conjunction with alif produces a sound like an 3yin, particularly in African dialects. Frankly I cannot follow a lot of his archaic abbreviations in English (or I'm stupid). But my take is that one particular case sounds like an 3yin and was written as an 3yin in some dialects. That has no bearing on the actual evolution of hamza - only on the interaction of pronunciation and writing in certain dialects (mind you not in Classical Arabic it would seem according to Wright).
According to Islamic Awareness (http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/Text/Scribal/haleem.html), which I have found to have very good historical Arabic information available, including very good collections of photo of Arabic inscriptions, these three men (Abū-l-Aswad al-Du'alī (d. 69 / 688), Nasr Ibn `Asim (d. 89 / 707) and Yahyā Ibn Ya`mur (d.129 /746)) introduced yellow dots for hamza and red dots for diacritic marks. The implication is that the hamza may not have existed as a distinct character in Arabic, but rather only as part of a split pronunciation of alif (as either modern hamza or modern alif). This idea is echoed in a few other sources of Arabic linguistics. For the time being, I am going to remove this claim, particularly since it is not relevant to Classical Arabic even in Wright's book. Michael Sheflin (talk) 06:02, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
Hamza vs wavy hamza
Unicode has separate glyphs for plain hamza and "wavy" hamza, eg. U+0625 ARABIC LETTER ALEF WITH HAMZA BELOW and U+0673 ARABIC LETTER ALEF WITH WAVY HAMZA BELOW. Could somebody explain the difference and add it to the article? Jpatokal (talk) 04:43, 28 June 2012 (UTC)
Shape
The yaa harf should not have two dots under, when it is in the beginning or in the middle? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.244.145.70 (talk) 12:30, 17 November 2012 (UTC)
sugestion
I suggest you to look through the book Mu'ajjam tasreef al-af'aal al'arabiyya by as-Safeer Antoine al-Dahdaah, there are examples of every type of hamzated verbs including hamzated and doubled, hamzated and middle-weak (with madda) etc. When I used to study the hamza-rules it helped me very much.