From: CE Whitehead (cewcathar@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Mar 03 2010 - 19:54:42 CST
Hi, I am not a native speaker of Arabic by any means; I can just barely read some in it; perhaps native speakers can help me with this.
You have all the variant glyphs of each character catalogued under a single character
for the most part
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0600.pdf
however there are various forms for Arabic aleph I presume because it is impossible to guess what vowel property it is associated with.
Also, in my opinion, which may not be correct, ا not آ should be the base character in this group--the squiggle across the top of ɮ is a long vowel mark; an option, in fact, would be to insert all voweling across a character like ا as diacritic marks; in fact, to create the accusative indefinite aleph at the end of a word it is necessary to use combined characters (ًا) although the order is somewhat unimportant except for spacing between the characters--which makes no sense either as the spacing is irrelevant. (See attached file.)
(Back to my beginning comment, I still wonder why the differential treatment of the various aleph glyphs, with some elevated to a sort of character status and others not--but it's not so important to answer this as the other comment.)
Best,
C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar@hotmail.com
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