Quoting Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh@sharif.edu>:
> On Tue, 7 May 2002, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>
> > However, I also think it is quite clear that U+06AC ARABIC LETTER KAF
> > WITH DOT ABOVE is the one that was intentionally encoded for the Jawi
> > ga character. This has been marked as an "old Malay" letter ever since
> > Unicode 1.0.
> >
> > The error would seem, rather, to be in choosing an inappropriate
> > representative glyph for the charts, and in the shaping class
> > assigned to the character in ArabicShaping.txt:
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > I'd say, as for the Pashto Kaf with ring, that the appropriate shaping
> > class should be "GAF", not "KAF", in this file.
>
> I second that. We may only need to correct the reference glyph and the
> shaping class. But please make sure that we are talking about a single
> character and not two.
>
> roozbeh
>
>
>
>
Dear Roozbeh,
I would strongly suggest that instead of correcting the U+6AC, we add another glyph of 'GA' of letter 'KEHEH' (U+6A9) with dot above. It is not 100% wrong of saying
that existing U+6AC represent 'GA' for old malay. Only that the glyph is in 'rare' shape and seldom being used in normal writing. The major problem for this glyph is it
can't represent the character when we want to use it as a first and middle position of a word. With the existing 'GA' of U+6AC, we can only use it when 'GA' come as
the last character of a word. The same case actually goes for 'KAF' in arabic. Although for Unicode it refers to U+643 as 'KAF' but in writing this glyph is seldom being
used due of its limitation of 'shaping transformation'. Same as the case of U+6AC, the U+643 cannot represent the 'KAF' when it located at the first or middle of a
word. Thats why in Arabic writings including Qur'an itself the letter 'KAF' mostly represent by U+6A9.
As conclusion, I would say that we can still preserve the existing U+6AC because it is not wrong, only the glyph is not standard and limited in its use. Later on I might
send some images to clarify my argument. The task now is to add another glyph that could present the standard and most common glyph of 'GA'. To view a full
standard jawi alphabet please refer to:
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/malay.htm
http://www.linguistsoftware.com/ljawi.htm
-Amir
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