Talk:Thaana

Time travellers / Anachronism
"The Thaana script first appeared in a Maldivian document towards the beginning of the 18th century", but in the same paragraph "It is inscribed on the door posts of the main Hukuru Miskiy (Friday mosque) of the island and dates back to 1008 AH (AD 1599) ". I don't understand this bit. No big deal, I just came for the definition of "Thaana" (but see talk section on abugida vs etc) 101.100.139.248 (talk) 07:58, 23 September 2021 (UTC)

That first sentence has been removed: it was extracted from  Naseema Mohamed's journal Scripts of Maldives. At that time, this inscription of 1599 hadn't been discovered. For the mention of this inscription, see the book Dhivehi Thaareekhah Au Alikameh. 43.231.28.188 (talk) 20:41, 10 October 2022 (MVT) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 43.231.29.169 (talk)

Abugida?
Based on what? The characters do NOT represent syllables, nor do the consonant signs inherently include a vowel. Thaana behaves like a typical abjad (makes sense, since it was derived from one) and should be designated as such. I'm changing it to "abjad". Bulbul 23:05, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Changing it back. An abjad indicates consonants, an abugida indicates vowels with diacritics. Taana was not derived from an abjad, but from numerals. Also, the Arabic script is sometimes used as an abugida. When writing Kurdish, for example, the vowel diacritics are required, so functionally Kurdish and Taana are composed like Devanagari. kwami 17:31, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

If Thaana is an abugida, then so is fully vocalized Hebrew. For the definition of Abugida see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida Wathiik (talk) 14:15, 21 March 2013 (UTC) -> Also note that in Daniels/Bright Thaana is listed under/classified as a Middle Eastern writing system. In any case, an abugida without an inherent vowel is not an abugida at all. Wathiik (talk) 18:55, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

Of course, Thaana is similar to an abugida AND to a fully-vowelled abjad, but I think the difference to the abjad is that even a fully vowelled abjad usually would also include some matres lectionis. So in a way one could argue that what differentiates thaana from an abjad is that there are no matres lectionis (i.e. no consonant symbols used for vowels), what differentiates thaana from an abugida however is that the vowel symbol is not INCORPORATED into the consonant sign and that there is no INHERENT vowel sign at all. So I guess in the end we just have to admit that thaana is neither an abjad nor an abugida but something else (an abugida doesn't have diacritics - the vowel symbols are always part of the consonant signs). Wathiik (talk) 12:18, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

It is not Abugida, but Alphabet
see http://www.omniglot.com/writing/alphabets.htm ->Thaana.

Abugida means, each consonant letter has an inherent vowel, usually [a], but in Tana [a] must be wroten as އަ. each Tana consonant letter has no inherent vowel, so it is alphabet. [unsigned]


 * Yeah, this is a bit tricky. Diacritics as in Taana can be argued to be modifications of the letters that carry them. The prototypical abugida, Amharic, is a script where letters are modified to indicate vowels. In Amharic there is no inherent vowel, as vowel cannot be separated from consonant, so by your definition the prototype of the abugida, the script which gave us the word abugida, is an alphabet.
 * In the prototypical alphabet vowels and consonants have equal status. This certainly isn't the case for Taana. Also, in an alphabet a consonant by itself is just a consonant, whereas in Taana a 'killer' stroke must be used. So although it isn't prototypical, it's closer to an abugida than to an alphabet. kwami 10:02, 1 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Amharic use Ge'ez alphabet. In Ge'ez alphabet each consonant letter has a inherent vowel ä.
 * http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ethiopic.htm
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge%27ez_alphabet#Syllable_signs
 * of course, Amharic is abugida, but Tana not. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.168.65.62 (talk) 12:04, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
 * we can see, in Tana alphabet the vowel letters are always above or below the consonant letters. this is unlike the latin alphabet. but in Hangul, the vowel letters are sometimes above or below the consonant letters, too. Since Hangul is alphabet, Tana is the same. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.168.65.62 (talk) 12:12, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
 * But in hangul the vowels and consonants have equal status, while they appear to be diacritics in taana. The problem is that none of these categories are absolute; even Japanese kana is to some extent alphabetic (when writing foreign names, at least). kwami 16:15, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
 * what is a diacritic? what is a letter? Only because the vowel letters are smaller, you call them diacritics? If in someone's handwriting the vowels are writen much larger, then you will call them vowel letters? Wheather a symbol is letter or diacritics, does NOT depend on how large it is in writing, but depends on its function.--217.110.18.206 (talk) 08:54, 23 September 2011 (UTC)
 * What would be convincing would be WP:reliable sources. Do you have anything? — kwami (talk) 00:55, 1 October 2011 (UTC)
 * A diacritic, whether vowel or consonant or whatever, must always be associated with a letter, but a letters can be written without a diacritic. The absence of a diacritic may mean "no vowel here" or an inherent vowel or something else, as, e.g., in Spanish the acute accent is "used to mark the tonic (stressed) syllable, though it may also be used occasionally in monosyllabic words to distinguish homophones such as si ('if') and sí ('yes')." (Spanish orthography) (Not only monosyllables: cuando means "when", as in "When she left she forgot her umbrella", while cuándo means "when?" in a question, as in "When did she leave?" --Thnidu (talk) 20:43, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

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