Talk:ܜ

Arabic letter?

I don't think this should be considered an Arabic letter, afaik it is a modified form of the ܛ that has been used to represent the Arabic ظ. After all Garshuni is still considered a Syriac script.--Rafy 21:09, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

By that same reasoning, "İ" wouldn't be a Turkish letter, "ä" wouldn't be a Swedish letter, and "ơ" wouldn't be a Vietnamese letter, rather, they would all be Latin letters (even though they were never used in Latin). Garshuni is a Syriac script used to write the Arabic language, not Syriac. --334a 17:19, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

You make a good point here, but wouldn't this also mean that regular Syriac letters are Arabic as well? And by the way modified Latin alphabet is considered a native script for Turkish, Swedish and Vietnamese.

I personally think we should name letters according to the native script to which they belong. There exist for example some Arabic and Syriac literature in Latin script (w:Arabic chat alphabet is one example) but we still don't label those Latin letters as Arabic or Syriac since native scripts already exist.--Rafy 22:59, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

Not to mention, what would you do with the Persian letters (ܭ) or Sogdian ones (ݍ)? -- Liliana • 23:01, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

• "wouldn't this also mean that regular Syriac letters are Arabic as well?" -- Yes, although I personally don't know enough about Arabic or Garshuni to create those entries. Take a look at a, b, c, etc., which have separate entries for multiple languages.
• "There exist for example some Arabic and Syriac literature in Latin script (Arabic chat alphabet is one example)" -- I don't know if I would call uses of the Arabic chat alphabet "literature", but that's just me. Maybe in a few years or decades if it really takes off and becomes a well-established form for writing Arabic, but right now I wouldn't give it the same status as Garshuni.

There are languages that have alternative scripts besides the "main" or "native" one (Serbian has Cyrillic and Latin; Chinese has traditional characters and Pinyin; Japanese has Kanji/Kana and Romaji). Sometimes, the native one has ceased to be the most frequently used (like Mongolian, which traded its vertically-written system for a Cyrillic-based script, though traditional Mongolian isn't completely dead). --334a 02:58, 12 October 2011 (UTC)