From: Marco Cimarosti (marco.cimarosti@essetre.it)
Date: Thu Dec 12 2002 - 04:54:20 EST
Houman Pournasseh wrote:
> The difference between the Arabic Kaf (U+0643) and the Persian Kaf
> (U+06A9) is in it's final form. The Arabic Kaf has a Hamza and is
> missing the diagonal line above the glyoh.
BTW, the "Persian" final form is also common in some Arabic countries.
I am attending a course in Arabic language, and the Moroccan teacher
corrected my "kaf with hamza" (ك) and asked me to always use the "plain
form" (ک) because, as he said, the hamza form is only "seldom" used in
printing. Moreover, the teacher's preferred form for initial/middle form
resembles Unicode's "swash kaf" (ڪ).
This is also confirmed by our textbook, designed for the first grade of
Moroccan elementary schools, where the "plain form" is used throughout, the
"hamza form" being shown once when letter kaf is first introduced.
He also said that the two dots under the final form of ya are almost always
omitted in non vowelized text. He wants us retain them, by now, to
distinguish ya from alif maksura (ى), but only because we are still working
with vowelized text.
Moreover, when he showed us the Arabic shape of digits (as all North
Africans, he normally uses European glyphs), "five" had the typical
"reversed heart" shape of U+0665 (۵).
These made me wonder about a couple of Unicode disunifications:
- U+0643 (ك ARABIC LETTER KAF) vs. U+06A9 (ک ARABIC LETTER KEHEH) vs. U+06AA
(ARABIC LETTER SWASH KAF);
- U+064A (ي ARABIC LETTER YEH) vs. U+06CC (ی ARABIC LETTER FARSI YEH);
- U+0660..U+0669 (٠..٩ ARABIC-INDIC DIGIT ZERO..NINE) vs. U+06F0..U+06F0
(۰..۹ EXTENDED ARABIC-INDIC DIGIT ZERO..NINE).
Shouldn't these better have been considered as font variants?
_ Marco
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