Re: Arabic - Alef Maqsurah

From: Gregg Reynolds (greynolds@greynolds.com)
Date: Fri Jul 16 1999 - 07:50:06 EDT


Hi Arno,

Your observations are entirely correct. What the Egyptian writer needs is a means
of saying "I want ya' semantics" (unicode) "clothed in the form of a dotless ya'"
(stylesheet). Unicode really needs a complementary style language. For example,
the semantics of "space char" would be something like 'prosodic word delimiter' to
which the standard style language assigns a blob of whitespace - unless the
language/script has other means of conveying the same info, as is the case in
Arabic, where final form is sufficient to denote word bound. But that would all
be controlled by the stylesheet.

On the other hand, pragmatically speaking it is almost certain that our fictional
Egyptian writer thinks of dotless ya' at word endings as denoting ya' semantically
(except where it denotes alef maqsura ;) ).

-gregg

Arno Schmitt wrote:

> Reynolds, Gregg schrieb:
>
> > Some notes on alef maqsurah:
> >
> > Unicode codepoint U+0649 is defined as "alef maqsurah", and the

> >
> > In either case, both dotless ya and alef maqsurah are needed. Dotless ya
> > would serve an additional purpose, since it is commonly used in Egypt to
> > denote the abstract character value "ya"; this is another place where a
> > sharper distinction between abstract character and presentation would be
> > useful. It should be possible (IMHO) for an Egyptian writer to choose the
> > dotless ya form to represent the dotted ya semantics. This is really no
> > different than supporting upper and lower case, except that dotless ya maps
> > to more than one abstract character.
>
> Here, I disagree. That end- and iso-yah have no dots is not a
> property of the word in question, but just a local rendering
> convention. When a book originally published in Syria with a final
> dotted yah is quoted in Egyptian it is rendered without the dots,
> just like in some German fonts A Umlaut is rendered not as "Ä" but
> as "Ae".



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