Re: Quranic Proposal

["Thomas Milo" <t dot milo at chello dot nl>]

Dear Mohammed,

I accept your apology, let's get back to work and deal with the matter point
by point.

As I feared, my first memo about this proposal was a but crude as it was not
set up as a diplomatic document. I have the impression it backfired because
of that.

Mete, thanks for explaining my sudden appearance on this list. I am
seriously interested in designing coverage of the Qur'an in Unicode
terms, no more, no less.

I propose to go through the list of missing characters and glyphs step by
step.

I was inpressed by the quality of your proposal and the level of detail that
you address in it. I did give the proposal proper attention, thought a bit
more about it and came to the conclusion that, from all the apparent defects
in Unicode that this proposal enumerates, the floating superscript alif is
the only thing that is not covered by either Unicode or font technology.

I occurred to me that the desired visual behaviour of superscript alif is
analogous to that of floating hamza, like in which we are already working
on:

Let me explain. For instance, word-initial stand-alone hamza as in Q2:61 /bi
aayaati/ should be encoded بِءَایَـٰتِ with U+621 for stand-alone hamza
instead of the present work-around using U+654 بِــَٔایَـٰتِ . This is
necessary in order to maintain textual integrity and analogy with Q2:99
/aayaati-m/ ءَایَـٰتِۢ. For this new contextual behaviour is needed that
will also resolve the problem with laam-hamza-alif that you mention in your
proposal: e.g., Q3:190 /la aayaati-n/ لَءَایَٰتِِ. As a result the word
/aayaat/ will have the same codes, regardles any prefixes, just like
/banaat/ بَنَات, /bi banaat/ بِبَنَات and /la banaat/ لَبَنَات.

As far as Unicode is concerned, earlier analysis already indicated that a
new hamza is necessary [a complication is that U+621 is already solidly in
use for Persian and other languages, that expect non-connecting behaviour of
isolatd hamza. Therefore a new floating hamza character must be proposed]
but the special behaviour of superscript alif is totally predictable - it is
triggered by preceding fatha - and therefore remains in the domain of
rendering. Both hamza and superscript alif can get optional support by a
calligraphic madda (keshideh), this will produce the required effect as seen
in the most widely spread editions of the Qur'an.

This analogy means that the projected new contextual behaviour for hamza
U+621 (or rather is proposed new replacement character) gets an additional
selling point for convincing rest of the industry. The issue of hamza and
superscript alif is a technical challenge for font technology that falls
outside the domain of Unicode. We are already designing this new behaviour.

t