"أَرْوى جَوْعانة."
Translation:Arwa is hungry.
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1623
Most Arabs nowadays differentiate ي and ى by drawing two little dots under the former, as you can see. In certain places word-finally, the "aa" sound is spelt with a ى, mostly in long words and words whose triliteral root has a non-initial Y in it, which gets replaced by that "aa" sound in most variants of the word. There are even a couple of patterns that incorporate it into their template. There are many words where replacing it with ي changes the meaning, like these:
عَلِيٌّ = Ali
عَلَى = on
مُنَى = Mona, wish
مِنِّي = from me
ضَحَّى = he sacrificed
ضَحِّي = Sacrifice! (An order addressed to a grammatical feminine)
كِسْرَى = Khosrow
كَسْرِيٌّ = fractional
1623
Well, as I said, the ى represents an -aa sound that originally comes from an -ii sound that Arabic grammar rules prevent from being pronounced as an -ii. In Classical Arabic, many dialects, like those of Najd and Tamim, maintained a difference in pronunciation between these two, with ى being pronounced /ɛ/ or even /e/. Some Quranic readings maintain this pronunciation.
1011
There must be a history to ا and ى . It doesn't make sense to have two different letters for the identical sound. Does anyone know it?