Re: Proposal for the Basis ofaCodepointExtensiontoUnicodefortheEncoding of theQuranicManuscripts

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

Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya wrote:
> Mr Thomas,
> Last time I remember you said that you consider the small meem, which
> in unicode have superscript and subscript is a mistake.

Well, one of them is certainly redundant. After all, the two small meems
only occur in vocalized qur'anic text in a rule-based complementary
distribution: small-meem-above with vowel-above vs. small-meem-below with
vowel-below. So much for the small meem.

> Curious, then
> what about hamza? The are super and subscript hamza, and then alef
> with superscript hamza/subscript hamza. On the other hand, yeh and waw
> does not have subscript hamza.So, how we should treat it? Some
> recomend not to use it (the yeh with hamza above etc), instead use the
> super script hamza/subscript hamza.

Hamza's are different from small meems in that they are also used in
unvowelled orthography. So even if they were in a rule-based complementary
distribution, the conditional information cannot be assumed to be present.

> In my font, I think it could handle most of the above cases, that is
> regardless you use yeh with super/sub hamza, or yeh with hamza above,
> it will render it correctly. That is if you use yeh with hamza above
> followed by a kasra, it will give you yeh with hamza below.  The same
> with waw, with the exception of alef. Or course, it can be done as
> well.

Like with difference between small meem and hamza in general,
yaa+hamza-below only occurs in vocalized qur'anic text in a rule-based
complementary distribution against yaa+hamza-above. On the other hand,
alif+hamza-above and alif+hamza-above are different from yaa+hamza in that
they are also used in unvowelled orthography

> So, any suggestion?

Well, the least I can suggest is to extend  canonical equivalence to the
whole range of hamza chairs according to these formulae:

<baseletter+hamza-above > = <baseletter><hamza-above>
<baseletter+hamza-below > = <baseletter><hamza-below>

Regards,

t