Re: chairless hamza

From: arno (arno@zedat.fu-berlin.de)
Date: Fri Jan 04 2008 - 12:12:57 CST

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    John Hudson wrote to Khaled, Thomas and me (Arno)
    am Freitag, 4. Januar 2008 um 16:43:

    John Hudson> ... you are always going to need to rely on the recipient
    John Hudson> having an appropriate font to render the text, and Quranic
    John Hudson> text is always going to need more complex fonts than modern
    John Hudson> Arabic, just as, for example, Biblical Greek and Hebrew
    John Hudson> texts need more complex fonts than modern Greek and Hebrew.
    John Hudson> So one way or another you either need to specify the font
    John Hudson> in markup or instruct the recipient what font to use.

    But all Hebrew cantillation marks, not to speak of letters, a properly
    defined in Unicode. Chairless hamza is not!
    We all agree that chairless hamza is not ALLways non-joining,
    but is defined as such in Unicode
    Leaving aside practical considerations, this must be remedied! ???

    John Hudson> I am also concerned about integrity of text, but coming
    John Hudson> at the issue from the other side:
    John Hudson> I'm concerned that the same letter not be encoded as
    John Hudson> different characters based on its
    John Hudson> context, because that undermines the integrity of the
    John Hudson> character/glyph model. Tom Milo has
    John Hudson> some good examples of interaction of hamza with
    John Hudson> prefixes, and I don't think it makes sense
    John Hudson> to change the spelling of a word at the character
    John Hudson> encoding level to obtain a particular
    John Hudson> appearance. So I was responding mainly to Arno's
    John Hudson> suggestions re. using different hamza
    John Hudson> characters in different contexts.

    I did NOT suggest to add an extra char, I asked for changing the defined
    joing behaviour of an existing char, if that can be done!

    But none of the grand old men of Unicode seems to interested in the subject.



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