Re: Questions about yeh, hamzah on yeh, alef maksura and dotless ba

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

Mete Kural wrote:
>> Got to try it with a high quality Arabic font and find out whether
>> Farsi yeh when used in combination with hamza above/below or small
>> alef takes dots or not. I wonder how currently existing high quality
>> Arabic fonts implement this.

I can assure you no font has been built with this kind of down-to-earth
practical insights. I think your analysis is an eye opener: it correctly
identifies the Yeh element of Yeh-hamza as a contextually conditioned
variant of Yeh.

Furthermore, the difference between Farsi Yeh and Arabic Yeh is in fact a
local preference that also exists within Arabic proper, so there goes Farsi
yeh out of the window(s) :-). And what about the "Alef Maqsura" conundrum?
Well, as soon as the concept of separately encoded dots is understood and
introduced into the Unicode Standard, practically all of the present
compatibility problems - within Arabic flavours and between Arabic-scripted
languages - will evaporate.

Standardizers don't need to worry, because it is all a matter of redundancy
in the legacy code that can be handled as equivalences. By doing so, Unicode
would gradually become the Unique Code that it set out to be in the first
place.

t