Marco Cimarosti wrote:
> Pournander and N.R. Liwal can help us: how is the "Arabic alphabet" called
> in Farsi, Urdu, and Pashtun?
Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
>Persian speakers call it "alefbaa-ye faarsi".
The same set of letters in Tajikistan is officially called "alifbo-i niyokon" - alphabet of ancestors.
The same set of letters in Afghanistan is officially called "alefbA-ye dari" - Dari alphabet.
In some textbooks and dictionaries 2 additional variants for so called majhul vowels in Dari can be found:
vAv-e majhul U+FBD9 (long /o/) and yA-ye majhul U+FBE4 (long /e/), but they are rather rare. So you can consider all 3 alphabets identical.
N.R.Liwal wrote:
>In Pashto they call it "Pashto Alefbe" having 15 Extra Characters.
My Pashto informants call it "dI paxto alifbe", saying it has 10 extra letters.
Letter "dze" is represented in Unicode by U+0681 "Arabic letter heh with hamza above",
though the sign above heh is not exactly hamza. It is a zigzag-like sign of the same height as hamza, but they are well distinguished. My informants could not recall any special name for it.
If you use "heh with hamza above", people usually accept it as a substitute, saying that "computer is not able to build a real Pashto letter" (?!).
I could not find such a letter in Unicode. I would be glad to hear some comments on it.
Sicerely,
Vladimir Ivanov
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