Re: Pashto yeh characters

From: linguist@artstein.org
Date: Wed Jul 28 2010 - 11:12:46 CDT

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    Quoting Andreas Prilop <prilop4321@trashmail.net>:

    Hi Andreas,

    Thanks for the references to the old 7-bit and 8-bit Arabic character sets.

    > http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/ISO-IR/089.pdf
    > http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/ISO-IR/127.pdf

    I think these clearly show that alef maksura was the intention behind
    the dotless code point immediately preceding yeh, which later got
    incorporated into Unicode as U+0649.

    In terms of practice, Arabic-language documents are fairly consistent
    about using U+064A for yeh and U+0649 for alef maksura -- except in
    Egypt, which has a tradition of not distinguishing between alef
    maksura and yeh in final position (both are written without dots).
    Here's an arbitrary page from today's Al-Ahram newspaper, where both
    yeh and alef maksura are encoded as U+064A (the same holds for other
    pages of the site).

    http://www.ahram.org.eg/241/2010/07/28/25/31443.aspx

    On my computer this looks particularly jarring, because two dots are
    displayed on alef maksura in words like 'ila "to" and `ala "on". My
    locale is set to en_US, I wonder if an Egyptian locale setting would
    cause U+064A to display without dots.

    Going back to my original question about Pashto, unfortunately I
    cannot use the advice you gave in your initial reply, "Use whatever
    you want." I am not creating Pashto documents for print or electronic
    distribution, but rather working on automated language-processing
    tasks. It seems that the only workable solution would be to unify all
    U+064A and U+06CC characters found in Pashto documents into a single
    character for processing (and also U+0649 if we encounter it). It is
    unfortunate that a distinction between the characters cannot be used
    for disambiguating unvocalized Pashto text, but this appears to be the
    current state of affairs.

    -Ron.



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