VMs: Are there samples of dotless Arabic in existence?

["John Grove" <John@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Curious - if anyone has knows of any sample documents written in 
dotless arabic...

John.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx]On
Behalf Of Jacques Guy
Sent: Friday, March 07, 2003 9:36 PM
To: vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: VMs: Verbs at begin - arabic ??


3/8/03 1:20:22 AM, Vladimir Sazonov <vladimir@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

>As I supposed, the nouns are mostly words starting with o-.
>The most words at the beginning of each page are starting with h-,t-,p-,f.
>Practically no label is starting from this letter.
>I suppose, such words to be verbs, therefore the sentence structure to 
>be like in arabic language.


Yours is an excellent suggestion. Arabic, however, is not the only
language with verb-initial sentences. All Celtic languages
are also verb-initial, and so are Polynesian languages.


>The arabic language has a very low enthropy because of omitted of wovels.

No. Omitting vowels in Arabic increases the entropy.

>We can reach also very small enthropy, if we remove dots above and below 
>arabic characters -
>then we cannot distinct B-N-T-Y and W-F and  S-SH  and R-Z and J-CH and 
>more.

Yes! That lowers the entropy immensely. I have read in various books,
that, originally, the Arabic alphabet lacked those dots, and that they
were introduced later. But I can hardly believe that. If it was so,
then reading a text in Arabic would have been a constant, painful
decipherment exercise. A completely dysfunctional writing system.


>Then. arabic language has beginning-forms, middle-forms and end-forms of 
>the same characters, and
>decoding from arabic cipher should be very difficult problem.

No, not really. 

>Has somebody investigated arabic language ?

We have discussed it. It cannot be Arabic written as it now, with
those dots. We never thought of trying "dotless" Arabic, at least
as I remember. I do expect that the entropy of a text written in
"dotless" Arabic would be very low.


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