Re: Quranic Proposal - Logical Codes

[Mete Kural <metekural at yahoo dot com>]

Salaamun Aleykum Abdulhaq,

> However, 
> they have a _meaning_ that is not indicated by any
> other code point.

Yes sequential fathatan does have a specific meaning
but that meaning is only in the phonetic sense. I
contrasted you the difference between "U" and "U
umlaut" in German with the difference between fathatan
and sequential fathatan. Changing from U to U umlaut
causes phonemic difference in the word, whereas
changing from fathatan and sequential fathatan causes
only a phonetic difference. Now I'm give you another
example from Arabic itself. The difference between
beh, teh, and theh in Arabic is exactly the same as
the difference between U and U umlaut in German. U and
U umlaut are different letters, just as beh, teh, theh
are and both cause a phonemic difference in the word. 

Don't you think that beh, teh, and theh deserve their
own codepoint more than sequential fathatan would? Do
you think that the difference between beh and teh is
in the same category as the difference between
fathatan and sequential fathatan?

> If the unicode body did not accept quranic symbols
> as codepoints, then what 
> is the sajda mark doing there for instance? They
> could have just said that 
> we should use two consecutive sukoons or some other
> magic code sequence.

The sajda mark is a single character and it indicates
the end of a Quranic part as you know. There may be
slightly different shapes of the sajda mark in
different Quran printings. Does that mean that we
should have a different codepoint for each different
variant sajda mark? So we only have one sajda mark and
that's all we need to add to Unicode. But sequential
fathatan, sequential dammatan, sequential kasratan are
three characters and they are simply variants of
fathatan, dammatan, and kasratan respectively. Imagine
how it would be if the users of the 20+ other
languages which use the Arabic script came and
requested to add all kinds of little script-specific
nuances found in their languages to Unicode. Then
there would be no more space left in the Arabic code
block. Arabic Unicode has largely been stabilized. It
is already really hard to add new codepoints. Adding
three more new codes for variants of characters that
are already part of the Arabic code block may be met
with great resistence. These codepoints are valuable
since there is a limited number of them. So Unicode
will probably be very conservative in this regard.

Kind regards,
Mete