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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Arabic orthographies [was: Re: Indonesian and Malay
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References: <4pv5rj$ok7@easy1.worldaccess.nl> <4q5cci$rf6@news.ccit.arizona.edu> <4q5s8e$s3b@colias.tutics.tut.ac.jp> <4q6i9u$ab9@euas20.eua.ericsson.se>
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 1996 00:14:34 GMT
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In article <4q6i9u$ab9@euas20.eua.ericsson.se>,
Stefan Lundstrom <euastl@eua.ericsson.se> wrote:
[snip]
>Talking about loans - one very big loan within the Islamic world is the 
>Arabic alphabet. A consonantal alphabet being used to write indo-european
>languages like Farsi and Urdu, or Malay for that matter, really does seem
>like an odd choice. Of course the arguments from an Islamic point of view 
>are obvious, but still.
>
>I know that if I were told to write Swedish using the Arabic alphabet, I
>would be at a loss how to do it. Swedish has nine separate vowels, all
>phonemic (? "making a difference"). It would be impossible to accomodate 
>these using only three signs (alif, waw and yaa). Even if we stoop to using
>vocalized Arabic, it would not suffice. But somehow Farsi and Urdu have 
>managed to do it. Does anybody know how? Has this influenced the language 
>in any dramatic way, like loss of vowels?

>PS. I just remembered that the turks managed to do it for several hundred
>years before Ataturk. They have e, u-umlaut, o-umlaut and i-without-a-dot, 
>which all would need accomodating beside the ordinary a, i, u. How did they 
>do it?

	With the help of various kludges.  The existence of complicated
vowel harmony in Turkish and the restriction of mid rounded vowels
(<o> and <o-umlaut>) to the first syllable of native words does help,
as does allophonic distribution of certain consonants.  (For example, 
/k/ has a palatised variant before front consonants.)  Just as the Russian 
spelling system takes advantage of this type of distribution to reduce the 
number of consonantal letters necessary, the Ottoman Turkish can to reduce 
the number of vowel letters needed.

	Take the example of 'kutlu', a common name meaning "lucky" 
(from 'kut' "good fortune").   In Ottoman Turkish, it was spelled
<qwtlw>.  <q> is an uvular stop in Classical Arabic; <w> can represent
both [u:] and [o:] (and, in Turkish, their umlauted counterparts).  
Ottoman Turkish /k/ originally had the value of [q] before back vowels.  
Therefore, <q> is never followed by a front vowel (like <o-umlaut> or 
<u-umlaut>) in Ottoman orthography.

	So, when a Turk reads <qwtlw>, he can automatically eliminate
the possibilities *k"otl"o, *k"utl"u, *k"otl"u, etc.  Because of the
restriction on the appearance of /o/, he can also eliminate *kotlo
and *kutlo.  This leaves only 'kutlu' and 'kotlu' as possibilities and,
as far as I know, 'kotlu' is not a Turkish word.

	Few of the cases are this straightforward, though.  Basically,
context must have made most of the ambiguous cases clear.

-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
