Re: Uighur - dotless YA

From: Becker.OSBU_North@xerox.com
Date: Mon Feb 08 1999 - 15:54:22 EST


> Is there a character presently in Unicode that can support this Uighur
dotless YA?

> ... seems to indicate that ALEF MAKSURA should
> be used for the Uighur dotless YA, but ALEF MAKSURA does not connect on the
> left; so I don't think it could be used, can it?

Good question, I think the bottom-line answer is that indeed it is intended to
be represented by

0649 ARABIC LETTER ALEF MAKSURA

whose primary presentation forms are

FBE8 ARABIC LETTER UIGHUR KAZAKH KIRGHIZ ALEF MAKSURA INITIAL FORM
FBE9 ARABIC LETTER UIGHUR KAZAKH KIRGHIZ ALEF MAKSURA MEDIAL FORM
FEEF ARABIC LETTER ALEF MAKSURA ISOLATED FORM
FEF0 ARABIC LETTER ALEF MAKSURA FINAL FORM

My understanding now is that ALEF MAKSURA enjoys a double or overloaded
interpretation among the community of users of the Arabic script, which is not
fully accounted for in the documentation of the standard:

    On the one hand, it semantically represents a final variant of ALEF, and as
such has no initial nor medial form.

    On the other hand, it glyphically represents "(entirely) dotless YA",
regardless of semantic interpretation.

The Uighur script has been spoken for in the ISO/IEC JTC1/WG2 standards
committee by China, who submitted a series of documents on Uighur, Kazakh, and
Kirghiz: N1012 (April 1994), N1097, N1474. I believe it was as a result of
those requests that the forms

FBE8 ARABIC LETTER UIGHUR KAZAKH KIRGHIZ ALEF MAKSURA INITIAL FORM
FBE9 ARABIC LETTER UIGHUR KAZAKH KIRGHIZ ALEF MAKSURA MEDIAL FORM

were added, specifically to ensure that 0649 ARABIC LETTER ALEF MAKSURA would
serve the function of the Uighur letter that you have enquired about. This
re-interpretation is reflected in the names of the F*** forms, but not in the
tables on pp. 6-29, 6-30 of the Unicode 2.0 book. (Also, the character names
in those charts were not updated from v1.0, a separate bug.)

Joe



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