Baṛī ye (, ; ), also spelled bari ye, baree ye barree ye, or badi ye, is a letter of the

Arabic script The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic (Arabic alphabet) and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world (after the Latin script), the second-most widel ...

, originally used in the

Urdu alphabet The Urdu alphabet () is the right-to-left alphabet used for writing Urdu. It is a modification of the Persian alphabet, which itself is derived from the Arabic script. It has co-official status in the republics of Pakistan, India and South Afri ...

, directly based on the alternative "returned" variant of the final form of the Arabic letter ye/

yāʾ Yodh (also spelled jodh, yod, or jod) is the tenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ''yōd'' 𐤉, Hebrew ''yod'' , Aramaic ''yod'' 𐡉, Syriac ''yōḏ'' ܝ, and Arabic ''yāʾ'' . It is also related to the Ancient Nort ...

(known as ''yāʾ mardūda'') found in the Hijazi,

Kufic The Kufic script () is a style of Arabic script, that gained prominence early on as a preferred script for Quran transcription and architectural decoration, and it has since become a reference and an archetype for a number of other Arabic scripts ...

Thuluth ''Thuluth'' (, ' or , '; , ''Sols''; Turkish: ''Sülüs'', from ' "one-third") is an Arabic script variety of Islamic calligraphy. The straight angular forms of Kufic were replaced in the new script by curved and oblique lines. In ''Thuluth'', ...

, Naskh, and

Nastaliq ''Nastaliq'' (; ; ), also Romanization of Persian, romanized as ''Nastaʿlīq'' or ''Nastaleeq'' (), is one of the main book hand, calligraphic hands used to write Arabic script and is used for some Indo-Iranian languages, predominantly Persi ...

scripts. It functions as the word-final ''yā-'e-majhūl'' ([]) and ''yā-'e-sākin'' ([]). It is distinguished from the "choṭī ye (; "lesser ye")", which is the regular Perso-Arabic alphabet, Perso-Arabic yāʾ () used elsewhere. In Punjabi language, Punjabi, where it is a part of the

Shahmukhi alphabet Shahmukhi (, , , ) is the right-to-left script, right-to-left abjad-based script developed from the Persian alphabet, Perso-Arabic alphabet used for the Punjabi dialects and languages, Punjabi language varieties, predominantly in Punjab, Pakista ...

, it is called waḍḍī ye (), also meaning "greater ye". In the context of Urdu and Shahmukhi, it is written as ए/े (for ''yā-'e-majhūl'') and ऐ/ै (for ''yā-'e-sākin'') in

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; in script: , , ) is an Indic script used in the Indian subcontinent. It is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental systems: alphabets, writing system), based on the ancient ''Brāhmī script, Brā ...

and ਏ/ੇ (for ''yā-'e-majhūl'') and ਐ/ੈ (for ''yā-'e-sākin'') in

Gurmukhi Gurmukhī ( , Shahmukhi: ) is an abugida developed from the Laṇḍā scripts, standardized and used by the second Sikh guru, Guru Angad (1504–1552). Commonly regarded as a Sikh script, Gurmukhi is used in Punjab, India as the official scrip ...

History

The baṛī ye is based on the stretched, horizontal, "returned" form of the Arabic yā’, originating in the

and Hijazi script and also used occasionally in

, Naskh, and

calligraphy. The form began to be used in this manner for

Classical Persian Persian ( ), also known by its endonym Farsi (, Fārsī ), is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoke ...

in India, for example ''kasē'' ("someone") was often written as .

Forms

Baṛī ye is written multiple ways depending on its position: There are also medial () and initial () forms, but they are not encoded on

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

and are generally represented by the regular ye. In the Balochi Standard Alphabet, baṛī ye (or ''cappi yà'' as it is known as in Balochi) has the forms .

Diacritical variants

In Urdu, only the

hamza The hamza ( ') () is an Arabic script character that, in the Arabic alphabet, denotes a glottal stop and, in non-Arabic languages, indicates a diphthong, vowel, or other features, depending on the language. Derived from the letter '' ʿayn'' ( ...

can be applied to baṛī ye. This is used when the word ending with the letter bears an ''izāfat''. In Kashmiri, there is a letter that is visually a baṛī ye with a small ''v'' sign above, known as the ''nīmü yāyūk'':

Burushaski

Burushaski Burushaski (; , ) is a language isolate, spoken by the Burusho people, who predominantly reside in northern Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. There are also a few hundred speakers of this language in northern Jammu and Kashmir (union territory), Jammu ...

, there are 3 baṛī ye's: , , and . One of the additional letters is a baṛī ye with the Arabic–Indic digit 2 (۲). It is used to represent the short vowel //. Another letter has a 3 (۳) above it. Unlike , which represents a shorter sound than the regular baṛī ye, it represents the same long vowel (//) but with

primary stress In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as i ...

(e.g. //).

Character encoding

Notes

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bari Ye Urdu letters Arabic letters Persian letters Arabic calligraphy