Re: QaMoose

[Hesham Hassan <hesham at bestweb dot net>]

On 05:50 الجمعة 04 يناير 2002, you wrote:
> Do we need to distinguish before the spelling and pronunciation?
> What to do with the diacritics (tshkil)? So we translate that into  a, o,
> i, ... or do we omit them? Kind of hard to omit them because two words with
> the same letters can mean different things when the diacritic changes! But
> we might need a way to distinguish a diacritic from a letter. For instance
> by adding a dot after the letter that represent a diacritic (tshkil is
> written as ta.shkil, here "a" is a diacritic).
>
> I don't have the whole system clear in my mind yet, but those thoughts
> might lead somewhere.
Hi,
  While I don't pretend to have a complete idea of a good system either, I do 
however ask why not just use a system that somebody else already thought out?  
The Omega typesetting project, http://omega.cse.unsw.edu.au:8080/index.html, 
already has a solution.  I am referring specifically to the document entitled 
"Multilingual Typesetting with Omega, a Case Study: Arabic" in their "Papers 
Published" page, 
http://omega.cse.unsw.edu.au:8080/papers/tsukuba-arabic97.pdf .   If you look 
at pages 4 and 5 (labeled 66 and 67 respectively in the pdf file), you will 
find that they describe a complete transcription system for Arabic letters 
using a Latin keyboard, complete with vowelization, repeated letters and 
everything.  However, since you say there are already certain established 
norms for transcribing many letters, maybe you can just adapt some of what 
they describe in their paper to your uses.

Regards,
Hesham Hassan