Re: Missing capital H from Unicode range (see 1E96)

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Aug 15 2005 - 14:49:39 CDT

  • Next message: Gregg Reynolds: "Re: Missing capital H from Unicode range (see 1E96)"

    From: "Gregg Reynolds" <unicode@arabink.com>
    > Philippe Verdy wrote:
    >> From: "Andreas Prilop" <nhtcapri@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de>
    > I believe (but I'm not certain) that the Encyclopedia of Islam uses "kh"
    > with an underscore stretching across both letters. H with under dot is
    > HAH.
    >
    > IJMES (International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies?) uses plain old
    > "kh", if I'm not mistaken. I think they try to stick to ascii.

    > Wright's Arabic Grammar (the standard in the English-speaking world) uses
    > "h" with underscore.

    All users of Arabic first names do not read an Encyclopedia, academic
    papers, or even respect some ISO transliteration standard...

    They are used much more largerly, and even the people that have such names
    tend to write it the way they prefer to be understood. (see for example how
    many Chinese people choose their romanized names: it's just a new choice,
    often unrelated with their Chinese name, not even phonetically...).

    So it's not surprizing that the romanization follows no standard given that
    the Latin alphabet is intrinsicly not made to support Arabic sounds. And the
    expected usage of these names is much larger than those that can speak or
    read or write Arabic.

    > In the chart of letters, it uses upper-case. In the text, proper names use
    > initial upper-case, the rest use lower-case. E.g. your example would be
    > "Haled" with the H underscored.

    All my examples were lowercase with initial capital (titlecase), followed by
    a all uppercase mapping.

    > "x" is commonly used, at least in informal ascii-based and other
    > translits.

    Yes but it looks like a "geek" convention understood only by specialists of
    Arabic when they wanted to communicate with obsolete ASCII-only terminals
    and protocols... So this is deprecated. For most other people, "x" does not
    fit well, because it translates to the equivalent of a "ks" ligation among
    Latin users (not for Greek and Cyrillic native speakers where it is the
    equivalent of a sharp "kh" ligation and still does not transcript well the
    Arabic "k'h" sound...)

    > I would be very surprised to see any transliteration using a mark on the h
    > only, where it is used as part of a digraph to represent arabic khah. Or
    > rather I would be surprised to see such a design gain market share.

    It's not market, it's culture. Toponomyms and, even more importantly, people
    names don't follow the market rules. Now add religious terms freely imported
    into other languages, and you'll see that uneducated people in foreign
    countries that can't read/write native Arabic will still need to write these
    words with the script they have around them, or simply to communicate with
    their children that have learnt another script.

    Out of Topic Note: did you notice the placement problem with the COMBINING
    DOT BELOW in the Verdana font on Windows XP, as shown in my previous
    message?



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