Controls To Distinguish Words Containing ḏ̣ā' From Those Containing ḍād

Abstract

The similarity between ḏ̣ā' and ḍād causes difficulties in both pronunciation and writing for most of people. Some researches tackled this issue at lexical and semantical levels, while other
ones focused on morphological or phonetic-phonological approaches. As an obvious and logical
consequence of all these adopted conceptions, some researchers used corpora representing the
whole Arabic language in their studies, whilst in other works, studies are limited to the Quranic text.
Hence, dozens of books and linguistic conceptions have been written and proposed by scientists
from various parts of the Islamic world, from the second century AH until today. The aim of those
works was to provide methodological controls to make distinction between similar letters,
particularly  ḍād and ḏ̣ā'  in Arabic words. Such a significant number of distinguished studies which are rare, even non-existent in living languages, is considered as a valuable knowledge heritage
worthy of attention and study in order to present new technical concepts.
The main objective of our study is twofold. The first one is to extract and summarize the rules and
controls that allow distinction between ḍād and ḏ̣ā'
', from this important scientific heritage. The
second one is to provide researchers and developers with a reliable database for processing Arabic
language.