From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Thu Mar 13 2008 - 17:58:07 CST
Andreas Prilop asked:
> The ALA-LC romanization tables for Arabic
> http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html
> http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/arabic.pdf
> show in rules 3, 8 (b), 9 the Arabic sign waslah on its own,
> i.e. not above the letter alif.
>
> Which Unicode character should be used for this sign?
There isn't one.
That entity in the ALA-LC romanization is considered a
representation of a glyph (part), not a character.
> (alif together with waslah is U+0671.)
And is encoded as an atomic unit in Unicode.
It is a little like asking what is the Unicode
character that should be used for the various dots,
circles, lines, and other marks that occur in
various positions around Canadian aboriginal syllables,
U+1400..U+1676. They simply aren't analyzed as separate
characters. So if you were trying to represent
text which was essentially metatext talking *about*
Canadian aboriginal syllables, and which had little glyph
parts on boxes to represent the various dots and such
with respect to the core graphs of the syllables,
you wouldn't have (or really need) characters for
those, either.
The ALA-LC romanization tables are metatext about
writing systems, and in some instances, as for the waslah,
they are talking about *parts* of the glyphs for characters,
and not characters per se.
--Ken
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