Salaamun Aleykum Abdulhaq, > However, > they have a _meaning_ that is not indicated by any > other code point.
Yes sequential fathatan does have a specific meaning but that meaning is only in the phonetic sense. I contrasted you the difference between "U" and "U umlaut" in German with the difference between fathatan and sequential fathatan. Changing from U to U umlaut causes phonemic difference in the word, whereas changing from fathatan and sequential fathatan causes only a phonetic difference. Now I'm give you another example from Arabic itself. The difference between beh, teh, and theh in Arabic is exactly the same as the difference between U and U umlaut in German. U and U umlaut are different letters, just as beh, teh, theh are and both cause a phonemic difference in the word. Don't you think that beh, teh, and theh deserve their own codepoint more than sequential fathatan would? Do you think that the difference between beh and teh is in the same category as the difference between fathatan and sequential fathatan? > If the unicode body did not accept quranic symbols > as codepoints, then what > is the sajda mark doing there for instance? They > could have just said that > we should use two consecutive sukoons or some other > magic code sequence. The sajda mark is a single character and it indicates the end of a Quranic part as you know. There may be slightly different shapes of the sajda mark in different Quran printings. Does that mean that we should have a different codepoint for each different variant sajda mark? So we only have one sajda mark and that's all we need to add to Unicode. But sequential fathatan, sequential dammatan, sequential kasratan are three characters and they are simply variants of fathatan, dammatan, and kasratan respectively. Imagine how it would be if the users of the 20+ other languages which use the Arabic script came and requested to add all kinds of little script-specific nuances found in their languages to Unicode. Then there would be no more space left in the Arabic code block. Arabic Unicode has largely been stabilized. It is already really hard to add new codepoints. Adding three more new codes for variants of characters that are already part of the Arabic code block may be met with great resistence. These codepoints are valuable since there is a limited number of them. So Unicode will probably be very conservative in this regard. Kind regards, Mete _______________________________________________ General mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/general
