Re: Proposal for the Basis of a Codepoint Extension toUnicodefortheEncoding of the Quranic Manuscripts

[Abdulhaq Lynch <al-arabeyes at alinsyria dot fsnet dot co dot uk>]

On Thursday 23 June 2005 07:15, Thomas Milo wrote:
> > If you are talking about those like yourself and myself, i.e.
> > interested in arabic and the quran, then I should say that a few days
> > spent learning the basics of tajweed would provide enormous benefit
> > to them in terms of understanding the symbols they're looking at.
> > This applies to arabs and non-arabs alike.
>
> Are you saying: "forget linguistic analysis, the Arab (Persian!) scholars
> worked everything out already?"
>

No, in fact I'd be very interested to hear what new material there was. 
However, we're talking here about encoding the quran, and as indicated, we're 
only encoding the information that has already been encoded.

The information that is already encoded is the textual data + the 
pronounciation guides of the tajweed indicators.

Therefore to ignore the tajweed marks and try and replace them with something 
else (whatever language/science that would be sourced from including modern 
arabic linguistics)  would be to throw out the semantics of the current 
encoding. Remember, the current purpose (in this forum) of encoding the quran 
is to encode what we have in our hands, that is entirely based on previous 
and long-standing scholarship (from around 233hijri or 1200 years ago, and 
yes many of them were from Persia - Baghdad, Basra  etc.) This is the best 
information we have as to how the quran was actually pronounced by the 
prophet (pbuh) and his companions. The chances of the muslims abandoning that 
information, which is trusted, for something deduced from speculation by 
modern sources, is so close to zero as to negligible.

If Gregg reads this then perhaps he could indicate some of the more advanced 
and ground-breaking work that is going on in modern study in respect of the 
pronounciation of the quran - I would genuinely be very interested.

wassalaam
abdulhaq