Re: Quranic Proposal - Logical Codes

[Mete Kural <metekural at yahoo dot com>]

Salaam Mohammed,

>   Please understand that this has to be easy, I
> can't imagine a typical typist
>   having to type 'logical' codes as if he is a
> programmer!

Typing logical codes is already something that is
imposed by the Unicode standard. A very good example
is the ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER (U+200C) used in Farsi
for numerous words such as "mi-zanad". The Farsi
typist has to enter this logical zero-width non-joiner
code in between "mi" and "zanad" otherwise the word
doesn't render correctly. Fortunately this logical
code has been conveniently integrated into the new
standard Farsi keyboard as "shift+space". You can read
more here:
http://students.washington.edu/irina/persianword/zwnj.htm

So basically there are cases where we need to use
logical codes because the other alternative (one
unique code for every combination) can become
redundant. The input of these logical codes can be
simplified for the user at the keyboard layer. For
example, for the sequential fathatan the user can
enter "shift+fathatan". Similar for other variant
dammatan's, and kasratan's.
 
>   But dammatan looks very different from
> damma+damma.

As far as I know, damma+damma is never used in Arabic
in a sequence to represent two dammas next to each
other coming after a base letter. Damma, fatha, and
kasra by definition associate with only "one base
letter". So having two seperate dammas for one letter
is not used in Arabic. That's why Tom is suggesting
that this un-used code sequence can be declared
canonically equivalent to a dammatan. Likewise
kasra+kasra and fatha+fatha can be declared
canonically equivalent to kasratan and fathatan
respectively. Of course these canonical equivalence
definitions, once accepted, would be part of the
Unicode standard, so it wouldn't be just our way of
doing it but the standard way of doing it.

Regards,
Mete