Re: Quranic Proposal - items 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12

[Mete Kural <metekural at yahoo dot com>]

Salaam again Mohammed,

>   And what about the small alif (8 in the proposal)?
>   I think it's now clear that it's like U+06E6.

The floating superscript alif is in the same category
as the floating hamza (found in al-aakhirat in the
Quran). Its visual behaviour is predictable from the
characters adjacent to it. This hamza is graphemically
the same as any other independent hamza. If you write
aakhirat without "al" article preceding it, the hamza
in the beginning of the word aakhirat is still the
same hamza as the hamza in the word "al-aakhirat".
Encoding this hamza different than any other regular
chairless hamza is very illogical. Imagine you type
the word aakhirat with a regular hamza in the
beginning. And then you add Al in front of it. Now
should you have to go and replace that hamza with a
special code to trigger lam+hamza+alef visual
behaviour found in the Quran? That would be
contradictory to the principle of graphemic encoding.
Similarly the special behaviour of superscript alif is
triggered by a preceding fatha, therefore it would be
against the principle of graphemic encoding to use a
different code for superscript alif there than the
superscript alif found in other places.

What needs to be done is that a proposal should be
submitted to Unicode to add a new "contexual
behaviour" to superscript alif U+0670. The added
contexual behaviour would be that when a fatha
precedes a superscript alif, the referred special
visual behaviour is triggered. Insha'Allah this would
be one of the items in our joint proposal to Unicode.

As to independent hamza U+0621, unfortunately it is
too late now to add a new contexual behaviour for the
special visual behaviour found in al-aakhirat. This is
because U+0621 is alredy used in Farsi to cause
non-joining behaviour for the letters adjacent to it,
and adding a new contexual behaviour to U+0621 would
break existing Farsi texts. Since Unicode has to be
backwards-compatible, we cannot add this new contexual
behaviour but we have to add a new chairless hamza
character that is conditionally equivalent to U+0621.
But for fatha+superscript_alef there isn't such a
situation (as far as I know) so insha'Allah we should
be able to add the new contexual behaviour to
superscript alef without problems.

>   And what about 9,10,11 and 12?

9 and 10 are already covered by the proposed logical
code to trigger sequential fathatan behaviour.

11 and 12 are already covered by item 6 in your
proposal.

Kind Regards,
Mete