From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Sat Oct 25 2003 - 03:55:36 CST
On 24/10/2003 18:09, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> ...
>
>Incidentally, the characters U+065A..U+065C are all tonal
>diacritics for African languages written in the Arabic script.
>They should not be confused with the similar shaped diacritics
>which are part of the extended letters of Arabic. The tones can be
>stacked on Arabic letters which already have letter diacritics
>as part of their shapes.
>
>
>
Are they also potentially stacked with Arabic vowel signs (harakat)? If
so, they interact with them typographically. And the standard specifies
that they should therefore have the same combining classes as the
harakat. The problem is, the harakat which appear in the same position
have different combining classes. And if x<>y, there is no z such that
z=x and z=y. So it is impossible to define these new characters in a way
which does not conflict with the standard.
Have combining classes actually been defined for these characters?
This is of course exactly the same problem as with Hebrew vowel points
and accents, except that this time it applies to real living languages.
Perhaps it is time to do something about these combining classes which
conflict with the standard.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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