Re: Proposal for the Basis of a Codepoint Extension to Unicode for theEncoding of the Quranic Manuscripts

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

Hello Abdulhaq,

Your suggestions are nice and I think it would be great to have an encoding that can capture the semantic importance of different grammatical situations. Unfortunately though this kind of grammatical support lies outside the scope of Unicode Arabic block and a higher level encoding scheme would need to be designed for this purpose. The Unicode people would oppose any effort to add codepoints to the current Unicode Arabic block that represent specific grammatical functions as yuo have cited. In any case this would not be consistent with the encoding model of the current Unicode Arabic block. But such a high level grammar-aware encoding scheme could indeed be done in the Private Use area as you say. Then a conversion algorithm would be designed which converts from the high level grammar-aware encoding scheme to the character-based Unicode Arabic block. This could be a good project to consider in the future.

Although I think we should first battle the difficulties with encoding the Quran in the current Unicode Arabic block as it stands and once we have a solution for that designing a grammar-aware Arabic encoding model for representing the Quran could be a possible next project. Besides this grammar-aware encoding model there is also a need to have another layered Arabic encoding model for those who want to do manuscript research. Tom has some ideas about this.

An alternative is to use XML to encode high-level grammatical constructs rather than a character encoding scheme. I think this will probably better. Since XML is getting really popular it is getting progressively easier to work with XML. The Ziyaada, Iqlaab, and other grammatical situations you mention could be encoded with XML elements that sorround letters for which these situations apply to. I know that would look really cryptic in plain text but an XML aware WYSIWYG editor that is designed for editing this kind of encoded Quran XML data could be used to conveniently do the encoding. But anyways, as I say I think we should now first focus on battling the Unicode Arabic block issues, but your proposal for a grammar-aware encoding scheme is worthy.

Regards,
Mete

---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: Abdulhaq Lynch <al-arabeyes at alinsyria dot fsnet dot co dot uk>
Reply-To: General Arabization Discussion <general at arabeyes dot org>
Date:  Tue, 21 Jun 2005 09:52:47 +0100

>Further to the list of new code points I would add:
>
>Superfluous Letters الزيادة
>This codepoint, called Ziyaada, would be represented in the font as a glyph
>that is not intended to be rendered such as a rectangle with the word ziyaada
>in it.
>It indicates that the letter is superfluous and should not be enunciated.
>In the saudi mushaf this is rendered as a circle الصّفر المستدير. In the South
>African mushaf it is not rendered.
>
>Signs of Stopping علامات الوقف
>It seems to me that the current codepoints are sufficient for now but I think
>that this scheme would be more future-proof and applicable to local
>variations in rendering if we were to add codepoints for these too.
>
>wassalaam
>abdulhaq
>_______________________________________________
>General mailing list
>General at arabeyes dot org
>http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/general
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Mete Kural
Touchtone Corporation
714-755-2810
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