Old business: الترتيب الابجدي and the ز ظ ذ cluster, حافظ حافز and ذو القرنين and زو القرنين

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Apr 18, 2021 at 11:22

الترتيب الابجدي is the order of the Alphabet in Arabic and it is based on the 22 letters of the Syriac alphabet and indeed the Arabic alphabet is supposed to be only 22 letters

Here is the order in Syriac: ܐܒܓܕ ܗܘܙ ܚܛܝ ܟܠܡܢ ܣܥܦܨ ܩܪܫܬ and in today's Arabic the order is the same and it is: ابجد هوز حطي كلمن سعفص قرشت

However, the Persian grammarians that worked on the Arabic language, grammar and vocabulary added ثخذ ضظغ when in actual fact these letters already existed in the Syriac alphabet under different letters. Example: the Syriac letter /ܙ/ or Zain and this letter covers this problematic cluster in the Arabic alphabet that was expanded by the Persian grammarians of the Arabic language and this is what we have now: The cluster of ز ظ ذ or Zain, Za and Dha

And this is why teachers of the Arabic language in the Middle East have to teach children about the difference in pronunciation of the three letters and this is why ذو القرنين can become زو القرنين and check this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHljFxRH8BY

Now, enter the new technology of "Voice to Text" and if one dictates an Arabic text that includes any of these 3 letters you better check the written text before you send it because the technology is not ready to tell the difference in pronunciation of these three letters

And here is an example: حافظ can be interpreted by the "Voice to Text" as حافز and indeed there is an Arabic word called حافز

https://www.almaany.com/en/dict/ar-en/%D8%AD%D8%A7%D9%81%D8%B2/

I always review any text in Arabic when I use "Voice to Text" because of such errors and this is indeed what happened when I dictated the word حافظ and it was written by the "Voice to Text" as حافز

And I wrote another post 2 hours later to indicate that this is a typo.

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