Template talk:rasm spelling of

RFD discussion: August–October 2021

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process (permalink).

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.

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Template:rasm spelling of, اٮرهىم

Created by an anon to represent the skeleton-only orthography used in early Arabic. No works have been written this way for a very long time, and those that were are consistently published with modernised orthography. It is essentially impossible that someone could come across this and want to know what it means. This template is only used at one entry (اٮرهىم), which should also be deleted. @Fenakhay, Fay Freak —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:06, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Theoretically, one could add a word where the pointing is uncertain. Sometimes unresolvable rasm words end up in editions. On the other hand, even then one would rather just guess non-rasm spelling (what’s the antonym of رَسْم (rasm)? إِعْجَام (ʔiʕjām) or is it the name of the dots themselves respectively using them or both? @Roger.M.Williams—so we have it clear in the future) by any means, and perhaps admit in the entry that the word is half reconstructed (yeah, I think reconstructedness is divisible). The potential of abuse, or annoyance more than avail, is greater. If it weren’t such an open-for-all website, it could be kept for the outlined academic cases, but in view of the wrong example, delete.

I oppose the deletion of {{unhamzated spelling of}} created by presumably the same individual, if you considered that, for there are bare editions omitting every hamza. Fay Freak (talk) 00:47, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

That's why I didn't nominate that one. Arabic writers are notoriously lax about proper hamza usage (and hypercorrection is common as well). This, however, is a writing style that has been extinct for over a millennium. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 19:17, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

@Fay Freak, رَسْم (rasm) could variously denote drawing, sketching, painting, writing, inscribing, describing or picturing vividly or in detail (as if graphically in a tangible, concrete image), transcribing, delineating, making animations, among other meanings. أَعْجَمَ (ʔaʕjama) could morphologically mean "to Ajam-ize" (that is, to muddy, to obscure, to make cryptic, to make βαρβαρικός (barbarikós, “foreign”)) or "to de-Ajam-ize" (that is, to clarify, to elucidate, to make intelligible, to strip the foreign character of). From the latter sense, an extended use marks out the letters that have been "clarified" with diacritics (each of which is called dot), as against those letters that have been passed over. The antonym of أَعْجَمَ (ʔaʕjama) in this sense is أَهْمَلَ (ʔahmala), from the image of these letters being "overlooked" or "neglected", as in the difference between the "clarified" غ (ḡ) and the "overlooked" ع (ʕ). I do not recall an antonym of رَسْم (rasm) in any of its graphic senses, although one could speak of the رَسْم (rasm) of the Quran, variously meaning the script or the spelling. The root overall largely overlaps with γράφω (gráphō) and scrībō. Roger.M.Williams (talk) 02:34, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

If Unicode encoded a full set of rasm such that someone could type rasm-only text, I would be inclined to keep this to handle those very old texts which were written that way—and I am already weakly inclined to keep it—for the same reason as we have things like loue or vp: it's using letters/characters that are (mostly) still used, it's just using different ones than the modern spelling of a word uses, which is just...a kind of {{alternative spelling of}}. (It seems odd to me that if a word is attested with ح instead of خ in a modern text it'd be allowed but the same alternative spelling in an old text wouldn't.) It would be useful for handling the ambiguous rasm that underlies يحيى, for example. However, I see some rasm are missing from Unicode, so we couldn't encode texts completely. Meh. - -sche (discuss) 17:52, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

• RFD-deleted. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 22:15, 8 October 2021 (UTC)