From: Andries Brouwer (aebr@win.tue.nl)
Date: Fri Sep 01 2006 - 23:05:59 CDT
On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 10:52:16AM -0700, John Hudson wrote:
> Andries Brouwer wrote [about U+06BE used for Uyghur]:
>
>> The reason that I call it wrong is that Uyghur shaping is well-defined,
>> while Urdu in the most common font shape uses only a single form,
>> and manuscripts and fonts that use two shapes vary in usage.
>
> No, I still disagree with this. The reason you can say that the Uighur
> shaping for h is well defined as being two forms is that you have only seen
> Uighur written in a naskh or neo-naskh style of type. If you'd seen Uighur
> written in the nasta'liq style you would not say this, because in that
> style it would be expected to follow the norms of that style, i.e.
> repetition of a single form for h as seen in Urdu written in that style.
Your reasoning seems incorrect, but I no longer object to your conclusion.
(If someone claims that the Latin alphabet has upper and lower case
then you could use the same reasoning to deny this and say that
such a distinction is invisible in a single-case-only font.
One has to find a way to distinguish "intrinsic" character properties
from "accidental" glyph properties, and the only way to learn about
intrinsic character properties is to examine the printed texts
in a large representative collection.
I think (based on little evidence) that Urdu writes this double-eyed h
with essentially a single glyph form, and the few cases where I have seen
more than one form, the distribution of forms was not always the same.
My tentative conclusion is that double-eyed h has no systematic shape
variation dependent on position, other than that implied by the presence
of connecting strokes.
I think (based on little evidence) that the Uyghur h is written with
two forms, dependent on position, and the dependence is well-defined
when it occurs.
I stopped objecting because I find that the webpages in Uyghur all use
U+06BE, so this is not a Chinese draft standard, but it is reality
in daily life.)
Now I started asking about Kurdish.
Actual practice seems to be: Kurdish H uses U+0647, Kurdish E uses
U+0647,U+200c or just U+0647 before space. (I still must find examples
with final H.)
Andries
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Sep 01 2006 - 23:15:22 CDT