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No, the letters are exactly the same. The change is caused by adding an accent above or below the letter, in this case the letter pronounced like "l" in English.



> the letters are exactly the same. The change is caused by adding an accent above or below the letter

This is a pretty myopic view of what's significant in writing. Why are you calling the consonant a "letter" and the vowel an "accent"? Would you apply the same rigorous distinction to é, which is a full letter (specifically Latin Small Letter E with Acute, U+00E9), vs é, which is a letter e with a combining accent above?


The correct terminology is a diacritic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics


There is no meaningful difference, for this purpose, between letters and diacritics; it is nonsense to say that "fit" vs "fat" is an easy, simple contrast because 'i' and 'a' are "letters", while the analagous distinction in Arabic is tricky because it is represented in different glyphs. They're all glyphs.


Well, English has situations where the word is written the exact same way, but pronounced differently.

The case that accents change meaning is also existing even in many european languages.

So, it’s not like latin-1 doesn’t deal with those issues either.

I’d assume it’s more other issues that are problematic with Arabic script.




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