From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Fri Oct 24 2003 - 19:09:57 CST
Philippe said:
> Interesting: these arabic symbols are proposed, but with strange names.
> I understand that these diacritics are needed to fit with their character
> properties (notably in BiDi contexts).
>
> 0659 ARABIC ZWARAKAY . Pashto
> Why not ARABIC MACRON ? Well, Zwarakay may be appropriate if this is the
> transliterated Arabic name.
The Pashto name.
>
> 065A ARABIC VOWEL SIGN SMALL V ABOVE . African languages
> Why not ARABIC OGONEK ?
Nothing to do with an "OGONEK" in shape or function.
> What is the relation between a Latin V letter
> and this Arabic vowel sign ? Isn't it modeled from the Latin Ogonek?
> After all,
> we also have a LATIN SIGMA, whose name is modeled from the Greek script
> from which it was imported, so why do we need to name it with an
> unrelated
> latin letter name, instead of using the more appropriate name used in
> the
> Latin script context? Isn't there a better name, transliterated from
> arabic?
Terminological consistency with the already encoded Arabic letters
with similar marks applied to them as diacritics. Cf. 06B5, 06EE,
06EF, 06FF.
The "V" here is not a literal reference to the Latin letter V,
but the more generic English sense of "V" (= 'vee') referring to
the chevron shape of the letter V.
>
> 065B ARABIC VOWEL SIGN INVERTED SMALL V ABOVE . African languages
> Why not ARABIC CIRCUMFLEX ? Same remark...
Incidentally, the characters U+065A..U+065C are all tonal
diacritics for African languages written in the Arabic script.
They should not be confused with the similar shaped diacritics
which are part of the extended letters of Arabic. The tones can be
stacked on Arabic letters which already have letter diacritics
as part of their shapes.
As tonal diacritics, these characters are probably historically
related to usage of caron, circumflex, and dot below as tone
marks, but their shapes (for the two v's) and positioning
behavior when applied to Arabic are significantly different
than caron, circumflex, and dot below applied to Latin and
similar letters. Hence the separate encoding as *Arabic*
tonal diacritics.
>
> This also affects the names currently proposed for the Extended Arabic
> Letters
> block 0750-076A.
Same considerations. It is a matter of naming consistency against
already established patterns.
> I note also that the proposed DEVANAGARI GLOTTAL STOP takes its
> name from the similar Latin character... This seems strange as other special
> Devanagari letters have a name transliterated from their local name.
It is just the glottal stop, borrowed into Devanagari and
nativized in usage in the representation of the Limbu language.
No other name was suggested, nor did any other seem appropriate.
> May be these names are not definitive, but only descriptive and were used
> for the early discussions...
They aren't *standardized* yet -- not until the official rounds
of ballotting. But they are *definitive* -- both the UTC and
WG2 have approved them at this point.
--Ken
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