Re: Arabic-Emacs questions

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at arabeyes dot org>]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 03:53:43PM +0900, TAKAHASHI Naoto wrote:
> 
> 
> > Yes; they should be highlighted though.  If the user, on the other
> > hand, specifies tatweel as part of his/her search then the search
> > should be a "strict" search in which tatweels ought not be ignored.
> 
> Hmm...  Then we must provide another incremental search, say
> isearch-forward-arabic, which behaves as if the user is searching a
> regular expression in which each base letter is followed by zero or
> more tanweens.  Since we already have isearch-forward-regexp, it
> should not be so difficult to implement.
> 
I am not sure if we're talking about 'tatweel' or 'tanween' here. 'tatweel' is
simply extending the word so it takes up more space. I can't think of any
reason why anyone would want to search for a word with explicit 'tatweel'
characters (but you never know).

> By the way, I thought tanweens are rarely used in written Arabic.
> They are used only in the Qur'an and elementary textbooks, aren't
> they?  Frankly speaking, I did not expect that you care about
> tanweens.

You are right, explicit tanween is not very often used in the literature
(unless the intention is either academic or for a demonstration). However,
it is sometimes used randomly (at least when written by hand).
 
okay, time to compile Emacs ;)

later
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