Re: chairless hamza

From: arno (arno@zedat.fu-berlin.de)
Date: Sat Jan 05 2008 - 14:41:26 CST

  • Next message: Philippe Verdy: "RE: List of Latin characters which look the same but are encoded differently"

    Behnam wrote:
    >
    > On 5-Jan-08, at 9:28 AM, arno wrote:
    >
    >> On all of this I agree.
    >> If my proposal will be accepted there will be a period for everybody
    >> to raise objections before it become binding.
    >
    > This is a wishful thinking don't you think?
    > The whole rtl user community has not yet established a directionality
    > standard, which is very basic and straight forward and very very
    > necessary. What would be the odds of Uighur, Kurdish, Azari, Uzbek and
    > other users actively participating in discussions of sub comities of
    > Unicode Consortium about changing hamza behaviour?

    I am 99% sure that nobody has reason to object.
    We have U+06C2, U+06D3, U+0681, U+0674, U+0675, U+0676, U+0677.
    I guess that kes care of exotic hamzas.

    >>> On the other hand, a proposal for a Qur'ân specific hamza will not
    >>> affect the status quo and any language at all.
    >>
    >> Here I do not agree. Deliberately I do not call the proposed new
    >> character 'Quranic Hamza' but 'Chairless Arabic Hamza'. We need NOT
    >> TWO different chairless hamzas for Arabic, one for MSA and one for
    >> Q24, we need only ONE with clear cut behaviour, it's just that MSA
    >> does not use it between joining letters.
    >
    > I understand your point of view. It is not differentiating Arabic
    > language, Arabic script and Koranic expression. I guess if you are not
    > Arab, or even Arab, but Christian Arab for example, you can easily
    > distance yourself with this point of view.

    Wouldn't it be strange to have a "Shakespearian a" and an "English a"?
    No, the real reason is: If you call it "Quranic" most users will use
    "normal" hamza for initial, final and iso hamza, and "Quranic" hamza for
    transparent hamza only, but John was fighting for one hamza in the name
    of the character/glyph model.

    Since we live in an imperfect world and have to live with a less than
    flawless Unicode, I will not threaten you with suicide or even a hunger
    strike. I just want to point out the advantages and the disadvantages of
    different solutions.

    But to do nothing but device fonts that have to contravene Unicode in
    order to encode the Qur'ân is not an option.

    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Jan 05 2008 - 14:44:35 CST