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

[Mohammed Yousif <mhdyousif at gmx dot net>]

On Saturday 31 December 2005 17:22, Thomas Milo wrote:
> Mohammed Yousif wrote:
>
> >  - If they are to identify the "e" sound Yeh not like the rest of
> >    dots, then I really don't know how this should be handled because
> >    these two dots in this context can not be considered part of the
> >    final shape of the letter Yeh since they add more information to
> >    the already known letter Yeh and that's not the scope of dots in
> >    Arabic. Maybe in that case U+064A should be used as a Yeh
> >    specialization, but then I wouldn't like that solution.
>
> What kind of use are you referring to?
>

Sorry, I don't understand the question.

>
> The word /stay'asuw/ in Q12:80 is rather a spanner in the works: its
> existence implies that there can be no rule that the sequence Yeh, Hamza
> can be trusted to be Yeh+Hamza_above/below.
>

The well established Qur'an sciences can be employed to know if the hamza is 
above/below or standalone.  Namely, the Rasm science, it disambigu clearly
this type of situations and identifies the various variations that can exist
with other types of Masahef "Maghribi Mushaf...etc".

Along with that, there is the fact that Qur'an has been taught over the years
from generation to generation by the mouth. Which means that Mushaf is not
the only way to know the nature of a specific element or letter.


> Meor's present encoding of this transparent Hamza as U+0640 TATWEEL. U+0654
> SUPERSCRIPT HAMZA is IMHO untenable from both a linguistic and calligraphic
> point of view: tatweel is not a grapheme (i.e., not part of any
> orthography), and it is totally font and calligraphy dependant. It happens
> to be used in such positions by the recent Egyptian and Saudi editions, but
> a robust encoding and rendering solution should not depend on ad hoc such
> innovations. I prefer to encode this hamz as U+0621 and then make sure the
> hamza is positioned between the surrounding characters rather that on top
> of the first one - without having to resort to a tatweel.
>

Can't agree more. Actually, the original ArabeyesQr implements this by using
only U+0640 for this type of standalone Hamza but that made the font quite
complex because no direct support from Unicode exists for this type of
situation and maybe Moer thought it's easier to just use Tatweel.



-- 
Mohammed Yousif
Egypt

"قال قائل منهم إني كان لي قرين. يقول أءنك لمن المصدقين. أءذا متنا وكنا تراباً 
وعظاماً أءنا لمدينون. قال هل أنتم مطلعون. فاطلع فرءاه في سواء الجحيم. قال
تالله إن كدت لتردين. ولولا نعمة ربي لكنت من المحضرين"  (من القرءان الكريم)