Re: question about Arabic: representing foreign words with "v"


Leonid Gluhovsky wrote:
Hello.

I live in Israel and most roadsigns here are written in Hebrew,
Arabic and English. I noticed that in some cases when a name of
a street or a city has a "v" sound in it, the corresponding Arabic
inscription makes use of a "nonstandard" Arabic letter: it's
similar to FAA, but has three dots instead of one.

This letter is taken from the farsi alphabet which is an extension of
the arabic alphabet. Persian (modern farsi) being an indoeuropean
language needed a more flexible alphabet, and more graphemes in order
to represent all the phonemes of the language. So they adopted some new
signs based on the arabic ones changing the number of dots. Check it
out here http://www.easypersian.com/W1/alefba.gif

Michelangelo Chasseur

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