Re: VMs: Feedback on: Are there samples of dotless Arabic in existence?

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

3/13/03 8:43:27 AM, Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>--- Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>"ur-consonant", for want of a
>> better word.

>Hmmm, yes I think I 'want' a better word. Is this
>like the glottal stop, or a soundless consonant?

No, no, you are light-years off!

Think of French which has e-acute, e-circumflex, e-umlaut,
e-grave. Imagine that "e" never occurred without an 
accent in French. What would you call it? 

Now in Arabic you have x+one-dot-above, x+two-dots-above,
x+three-dots-above, x+two-dots-underneath, x+one-dot-
underneath.

They are respectively  <n>, <t>, <th> (as in "thin"),
<y> (as in "yes"), and <b>.

(The x bit, BTW, does not look like x, but just like a 
small protrusion, a squat dotless <i> connected to the
letter before and the letter after). 

What do we call this x? 

Consider: if Voynichese is really Arabic, or in the Arabic
alphabet written with the dots before we have:

'x = <n>
"x = <t>
.x = <b>
and so on.

What do we call x? Remember: the term "consonant" should
enter into it because on can use the same system to 
represent French vowels (and German, and Hungarian, and 
Portuguese and...)

In Arabic you have also a very rare combination of this
"x" which hamza, but that is a later kludge to represent
a glottal stop.


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