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.

Here is an example: <http://www.geocities.com/schket/zikhron.jpg>.
It's a picture of a roadsign before Zikhron Yaacov interchange
(Zikhron Yaacov is a city in Israel).

I've never seen this letter in Arabic textbooks. It's not mentioned
in web articles about Arabic alphabet either. I would be grateful
if someone could tell me something about this letter, is it commonly
used to represent "v" in non-Arabic words, why is it never mentioned
in textbooks, etc. Are there more letters like this, used to write
foreign words?

It's not that this letter is always used to represent "v". For
example, when "Tel Aviv" is written in Arabic, BAA is used for
both v's.


the extar sounds and letters used in the foreign words and names in
modern literary arabic is discussed nicely in this thesis:


Author Sa'id, Majed F., 1927-1966
Title Lexical innovation through borrowing in modern standard Arabic /
by Majed F. Sa'id
Published [Priceton,N.J.] [1964, c1965]
Descript'n x, 123 leaves
Note Thesis--Princeton University




Many thanks,

leonid

.

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