Re: Tanween variants and Unicode

["Mete Kural" <metek at touchtonecorp dot com>]

Hello Meor,

>So, seems like my timezone is totally different from the rest ...

Yup I think most of us are either in North America or Middle East/Europe regions.

>Just to clarify, the use of small letters in Madinah Mushaf is
>different from what is used by others. You can see at
>http://www.quranpak.com/sample1.htm . The Superscript/small alef is
>used to denote the "A" sound of 2 harakat, without the fatha. Take the
>word "ala" , in the sample in spelled out as "ain fatha lam
>superscriptalef alefmaksura", whereby in Madinah mushaf, "ain fatha
>lam fatha alefmaksura superscriptalef". So, the superscript alef in
>Madinah Mushaf is not really a supersciptalef, it is small alef. 

In the Madinah Mushaf dagger/small alef lengthens the "A" sound of 'alaa. They have put a fatha on top of the lam which is unnecessary but that's the way the Madinah Mushaf works. They put a fatha on letters that are followed by a long "A" vowel even if it is unnecessary. In the Pakistani Mushaf they have not put the unnecessary fatha on top of the lam in 'alaa which is totally fine because that fatha is unnecessary since it is obvious that the vowel is "A" there. But the function of dagger/small alef remains the same in this word 'alaa in both the Madinah Mushaf and the Pakistani Mushaf which is to lengthen the "A" sound as if there was an extra alef there. Are there any other examples that you think there is a difference in the function of dagger/small alef among the Pakistani Mushaf and the Madinah Mushaf?

In the following verse you see that in the Pakistani Mushaf they have used dagger/small alef instead of hamza in the word 'aamannaa. This is an orthographic difference between the Pakistani Mushaf and the Madinah Mushaf. Both the hamza and the dagger/small alef in that case lengthen the "A" sound by representing an alef that is not there but pronounced as if it is there. Similarly in al-aakhir in verse 2:8. Again Pakistani Mushaf uses dagger/small alef whereas Madinah Mushaf uses a hamza. This is an orthographic difference, but the function of the dagger/small alef remains the same between both masahif in these cases. But if you can find other cases where the function differs please let me know. I am very interested in these kinds of things.

>So, in Madinah Mushaf, the superscript/small waw in sura 17, aya7 is
>actually have the same function as other small waw at the end of word,
>it is just that the "missing" waw for that word occured in the middle
>of the word.

This small waw issue will probably have to wait for a future version of Unicode. They're not even accepting new codepoints for Unicode 5.0 any more and it's also hard to get codepoints in Unicode 5.1 any more. Some things may have to wait till Unicode 6.0. I am not even sure if they will accept the new hamza codepoint in Unicode 5.0 yet. So there may have to be more proposals in the future, piece by piece.

>Unicode support for these character/symbol is very confusing at best.
>For the small waw, they only have small waw, not superscript waw. For
>the small yeh, they have both, the spacing glyph and the superscript
>one. And the worst the the alef, named as superscript alef, but
>described as a vowel mark, so I myself have no idea what it means, or
>it what it suppose to represent. Take the SIL font for example, they
>have the small waw as a non spacing glyph, contrary to Unicode
>description. This is just one example how misleading the document
>really is.

I agree with you that some of the characters need to be clarified.

>So, if you ask me, the best is for unicode to either change the
>glyph/character property as propsed by Yousif, or add few more
>codepoints for the "missing" glyph. Second approach probably can be
>adopted faster.

Faster? Not really. It takes over a year sometimes to get a new codepoint added to Unicode since with each new codepoint a whole bunch of discussion may take place. Some take even longer than a year. And then you have to wait for companies to support the new version of Unicode in their software which usually takes at least another year on top of that. For instance we have been working on the new hamza codepoint for two years now since it is considered kind of controversial and we still couldn't get it added. I hope it will make it to Unicode 5.0 but we're not even sure. There is a chance it might be delayed till Unicode 5.1.

>Another important thing about technology: Pocket PC 2003 does not have
>full opentype support. I'm not sure about palm, but I doubt it has. 
>So, we can't display the text on those platform. I think these
>platform is very important for displaying the Quran, since it is the
>most convenient for all. ( I really would like to get one specifically
>for reading the Quran).

Don't worry, by the time these new features get added to Unicode and companies start implementing the new Unicode version it will be at least several years anyways. By that time I hope OpenType support would be added to those platforms but of course font portability is another problem. For instance Bitstream recently added OpenType support to Symbian OS which runs on cellphones. And as far as I know there is some support for OpenType in Pocket PCs (OpenOffice.org says that there is some OpenType support in Pocket Word http://xml.openoffice.org/xmerge/plugins/pocketword.html). Windows Mobile 5 probably has a little better support. By the time Unicode 6.0 is out probably Windows Mobile 6 or something gets released and hopefully they will have yet better support there.

Well the thing is that it takes a while to add new features to Unicode Arabic after the introduction. As I said it has been two years since we've discussed the new hamza codepoint but the Unicode community is very conservative and it's hard to get things added. I think finally now they don't have reasonable objections to this new hamza codepoint so we will go ahead and propose it God willing. The new hamza codepoint may make it to Unicode 5.0 but any other codepoint will have to probably wait for Unicode 6..0 anyways. Unicode 6.0 is probably two years ahead of us. Add another year for companies to support Unicode 6.0. Which means that any new codepoint after this point will not be available to users as a standard for about three years. So as far as Unicode is concerned nothing is fast. For the next three years we have to figure out what "workarounds" to use for all of the currently missing Qur'anic features (except hopefully the new hamza). So just to mention that we are looking at the long term here. If a codepoint gets added it won't be available as a standard "right now" anyways.

So if you want to propose six new codepoints for tanween variants by all means go ahead. We are already struggling with just one codepoint. Besides that I don't think it is a good idea to propose these six new codepoints, I wouldn't even have the time and energy to get six new codepoints accepted by the Unicode community anyways. If the Unicode community allows these six codepoints by any chance, then with canonical equivalences they would be made equivalent to <tanween+modifier> sequence, that is if the <tanween+modifier> sequence ever makes it into Unicode.

Regards,
Mete

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Mete Kural
Touchtone Corporation
714-755-2810
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