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Re: Which type of mushaf ins Unicode encoding?

Thomas Milo wrote: 

Now there was the authoritative source that claims there was originally a
single vowel followed by a small or big noon. I consulted another
authoritative source, Dr Gerd-R�diger Puin, researcher into the history of
Qur'anic orthography, and he confirmed my observation that the oldest
manuscripts express tanween with two, horizontally aligned vowel signs. This
is also how Yasin Dutton describes them - no trace of a small noon, let
alone a big one.

I don't doubt this at all, as a matter of historical record. But I don't think the author of al-naHw al-waafiy would disagree. I think he's talking about what happened at a later stage - the transition from dots to "standard" tanween marks. I don't have my dates down very well, but I suspect the earliest (dotted) orthography emerged before the science of grammar solidified. Note that a crucial (and in my view very inventive) element of Hasan's text is that the nuun of tanween is considered a distinct word, which indicates to me (speculatively) interaction in the development orthography and grammatical science. So I would guess that the tanween as described by Hasan developed somewhat later than the period of the earliest ms. I would be interested in knowing if Dr. Puin or Dutton could put a date on when the orthography changed.

So I would put the argument as follows: not that this notion of tanween reflects the oldest orthographic practice, but that it reflects the traditional understanding of the most historically common orthography.

Yet, as a logical device, I like the elegance of the 
formula:

[vowel <a/u/i>]+[any tanween <regular/iqlaab/idgaam>
(as many as you can identify; these are the three expressed in the Saudi
orthography, AFAIK)

This structure guarantees searching in existing Unicode-enabled
environments. It also guarantees that modern font technology can take care
of the shapes, whether Pakistani , Egyptian, Saudi or North African. This
approach would mean that on the level of plain text code, Qur'ans remain
identical when they do not conceptually differ and it would make research
into real differences much more efficient.

A simple canonical equivalence insures legacy compatibility with existing
fathatan, dhammatan and kasratan.

t




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