Joe,
Thanks for the explanation you sent regarding the Uighur dotless YA. I
previously did not see the FBE8 and FBE9 ALEF MAKSURA characters. It's
probably just as well, because if I had considered those without the
benefit of your explanation, I only would have been more perplexed.
I will support this Uighur character as you explained; but, it seems to me
that this Uighur dotless YA may be a good candidate to be a new, distinct
character in Unicode. Except for the glyphic representation of the final
and isolate forms, I see little similarity between ALEF MAKSURA and this
Uighur character. Aren't alphabetic characters in Unicode primarily
determined by the distinct phonetic values they represent?
Maybe it is already being considered because I notice on page B-3 of the
Unicode 2.0 manual that proposals for additional Uighur/Kazakh/Kirgiz
characters have been made.
Perhaps you can help clarify another issue here. Considering the addition
of FBE8 and FBE9, is it now correct that ALEF MAKSURA "always" be
classified as a dual connecting letter? Or would it only be correct to
classify it as dual connecting when used in Uighur/Kazakh/Kirgiz? That
would mean that this is a case where the connecting behavior of a
particular Arabic script letter is not consistant for all languages. (That
does not seem so good.)
thanks,
mike forgey
At 12:54 PM 2/8/99 PST, Becker.OSBU_North@xerox.com wrote:
>
>> Is there a character presently in Unicode that can support this Uighur
>dotless YA?
>
>> ... seems to indicate that ALEF MAKSURA should
>> be used for the Uighur dotless YA, but ALEF MAKSURA does not connect on the
>> left; so I don't think it could be used, can it?
>
>
>Good question, I think the bottom-line answer is that indeed it is
intended to
>be represented by
>
>0649 ARABIC LETTER ALEF MAKSURA
>
>whose primary presentation forms are
>
>FBE8 ARABIC LETTER UIGHUR KAZAKH KIRGHIZ ALEF MAKSURA INITIAL FORM
>FBE9 ARABIC LETTER UIGHUR KAZAKH KIRGHIZ ALEF MAKSURA MEDIAL FORM
>FEEF ARABIC LETTER ALEF MAKSURA ISOLATED FORM
>FEF0 ARABIC LETTER ALEF MAKSURA FINAL FORM
>
>
>My understanding now is that ALEF MAKSURA enjoys a double or overloaded
>interpretation among the community of users of the Arabic script, which is
not
>fully accounted for in the documentation of the standard:
>
> On the one hand, it semantically represents a final variant of ALEF,
and as
>such has no initial nor medial form.
>
> On the other hand, it glyphically represents "(entirely) dotless YA",
>regardless of semantic interpretation.
>
>The Uighur script has been spoken for in the ISO/IEC JTC1/WG2 standards
>committee by China, who submitted a series of documents on Uighur, Kazakh,
and
>Kirghiz: N1012 (April 1994), N1097, N1474. I believe it was as a result of
>those requests that the forms
>
>FBE8 ARABIC LETTER UIGHUR KAZAKH KIRGHIZ ALEF MAKSURA INITIAL FORM
>FBE9 ARABIC LETTER UIGHUR KAZAKH KIRGHIZ ALEF MAKSURA MEDIAL FORM
>
>were added, specifically to ensure that 0649 ARABIC LETTER ALEF MAKSURA would
>serve the function of the Uighur letter that you have enquired about. This
>re-interpretation is reflected in the names of the F*** forms, but not in the
>tables on pp. 6-29, 6-30 of the Unicode 2.0 book. (Also, the character
names
>in those charts were not updated from v1.0, a separate bug.)
>
>Joe
------------------------------------------
Michael Forgey
2201 W. William Cannon Dr. #224
Austin, TX 78745 USA
tel: (512) 441-7390 fax: (512) 441-7742
forgey@sprintmail.com
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