Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 August 23

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August 23

Why does arabic ba have a dot? What is it a variant of?

The arabic form for the letter ba has a dot underneath as part of its form. According to Arabic diacritics#I‘jām this is called an i'jam, and it's used to indicate that a letter is a variant form, or rasm. For example jim with a single dot below is a variant of the undotted ha. Looking at the rest of the Arabic alphabet we see that ta, tha, and pe are also variants of the same form as ba, with different numbers of dots above or below the form. But what would the original un-dotted form be? It is not present in the alphabet.

Comparing with the Hebrew bet, we see that it is a dotted form of vet. One might venture a guess that arabic or one of its precursors once had an original form va, now deprecated, that ba was the dotted rasm of. Would that be a correct guess? -lethe ^{talk + contribs} 13:10, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

Trying to look up the history of the Arabic alphabet, it seems as it was derived from the Nabatean alphabet, itself from the Aramaic script. The Nabatean script was used by both Aramaic and Arabian speakers, but it was only the Aramaic who had a phonetic b/v-distinction, which makes it rather odd that a dotted variant was the only glyph surviving in Arabic. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:15, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

When several letters have the same rasm, that sometimes means they originated from the same Nabataean letter, but in other cases, they are originally different letters that just came to be written in the same way in the undotted script. The i'jam were added to distinguish them, but not in a very systematic way. In the case of ba, it was already a distinct letter in the Nabataean script. Adding a dot below did not create a new letter, it just clarified that the letter is ba and not something else. There’s not some other letter that ba was historically derived from and then lost. This is similar to the dot on the letter i in the Latin alphabet. The dot was not added to create a new letter, but just to further distinguish it from others in cases where they could easily be confused. —Amble (talk) 16:57, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

Lethe -- Amble is correct. 21 Nabatean letters were borrowed to write Arabic, and in some cases dots were added to expand this 21 to the 28 that were needed for early medieval Arabic, while in other cases dots were added to distinguish some of the original 21 letters that came to have a similar or identical shape in cursive writing. The dot under the "b" letter isn't any different from the dot over the "n" letter, or the two dots under the "y" letter -- there's no related letter to be distinguished, but the medial form of each of these letters is the same (a simple upwards squiggle), so that the dots distinguish the letters from each other (and from the "t" letter with two dots above, and the "th" letter with three dots above). The Hebrew diacritic dot in the middle of letters (only ever one dot) is known as "dagesh", and distinguishes allophones of the same phoneme. It has no connection whatsoever with the Arabic dots (one or two or three) above and below, which distinguish basic letters from each other... AnonMoos (talk) 19:21, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

As AnonMoos says. The closest analogue to the Arabic dots is the dot one or other side of Hebrew sin/shin: again, there is no "basic" letter without a dot, and the dots distinguish two different letters. ColinFine (talk) 21:00, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

The sin/shin dots appear only in dotted writing; they should be thought of as diacritics, just like the dot distinguishing בּ‎ from ב‎, or the dots distinguishing וֹ‎ from וּ‎.  --Lambiam 23:04, 26 August 2024 (UTC)