Information About ®Thaana |
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The origins of Thaana are unique among the world's alphabets: The first nine letters (h–v) are derived from the Arabic numerals, whereas the next nine (m–d) were the local Indic numerals. (See Hindu-Arabic Numerals .) The remaining letters for loanwords (z–ch) and Arabic transliteration are derived from phonetically similar native consonants by means of diacritics, with the exception of y, which is of unknown origin. This means that Thaana is one of the few alphabets not derived graphically from the Original Semitic Alphabet — unless the Indic numerals were (see Brahmi Numeral s). Thaana, like Arabic, is written right to left. It indicates vowels with diacritic marks derived from Arabic. Each letter must carry either a vowel or a ''sukun'' (which indicates "no vowel"). The only exception to this rule is ''noonu'' which, when written without a diacritic, indicates Prenasalization of a following Stop . The Vowel signs are called ''fili''; there are five ''fili'' for short vowels (a,i,u,e,o), where the first three look identical to the Arabic vowel signs (''fatha'', ''kasra'' and ''damma''). Long vowels (aa,ee,oo,ey,oa) are denoted by doubled ''fili'' (except oa, which is a modification of the short ''obofili''). The letter ''alifu'' has no sound value of its own and is used for three different purposes: It can act as a carrier for a vowel with no preceding consonant, this is, a word-initial vowel or the second part of a Diphthong ; when it carries a ''sukun'', it indicates Gemination (lengthening) of the following consonant; and if ''alifu''+''sukun'' occurs at the end of a word, it indicates that the word ends in /eh/. Gemination of nasals, however, is indicated by ''noonu''+sukun preceding the nasal to be geminated. Thaana occupies Unicode codepoints 1920-1983 (hexadecimal 0780-07BF). Source: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/thaana.htm EXTERNAL LINKS
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