Ya ي

Ya is the twenty-eighth and last letter of the modern Arabic order and the tenth of the older abjad order, from which it takes the numeral value ten. Standing alone or at the end of a word it is a shallow bowl with a hooked tail and two dots below; joined at the beginning or in the middle it contracts to a tooth carrying its two dots beneath, the same shape as ba, ta, tha and nun with different pointing.

Ya is a moon letter. Like waw it works as both consonant and vowel, writing the y of English and the long vowel i, and roots containing it behave irregularly in the verb system for the same reason.

Written at the end of a word without its two dots, ya is a different thing again: it is called alif maqsura, the shortened alif, and it stands for a long a rather than a long i. Whether a final letter of that shape carries dots is therefore a matter of spelling that changes the sound, and the convention is not uniform, since Egyptian printing has commonly left the dots off ordinary final ya while other traditions print them. That is one of the small differences that tell a reader where an edition was produced.

Its name descends from the Northwest Semitic yod, the cognate of Hebrew yod and Syriac yudh, whose sense was hand, and it holds the numeral value ten that Hebrew yod holds. Ya is one of the fourteen letters that appear disjoined at the head of a sura.

The Arabic alphabet is usually given as twenty-eight letters, and the count is a convention rather than a fact about the marks on the page. Several things that are written and read are not among the twenty-eight.

Alif maqsura is a final ya without its dots, standing for a long a. Ta marbuta is a final ha with the two dots of ta, closing most feminine nouns and pronounced as t or as a light h according to context. The hamza, which writes the glottal stop, is a sign rather than a letter, and is carried on an alif, a waw or an undotted ya, or written on the line alone. The lam alif ligature is a single mark standing for two letters. Alif madda is an alif with a wavy stroke above it, marking a glottal stop followed by a long a. None of these has a numeral value in the abjad reckoning, and none is counted in the twenty-eight.

Whether they are letters is not a question with a single answer, and different teaching traditions answer it differently. Charts printed for beginners commonly show twenty-nine items by adding lam alif at the end, and some add hamza as well. The abjad sequence, being a list of values, counts only the twenty-eight.

That the count is conventional matters for anything that depends on it. A numerological claim that rests on there being exactly twenty-eight letters, or on their total being some particular sum, has taken a teaching convention as though it were a datum. The letters that carry values are the twenty-eight, the values are those of the inherited sequence in one of two regional reckonings, and everything else on the page is a spelling device.