Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya wrote: > Mr Thomas, > Last time I remember you said that you consider the small meem, which > in unicode have superscript and subscript is a mistake.
Well, one of them is certainly redundant. After all, the two small meems only occur in vocalized qur'anic text in a rule-based complementary distribution: small-meem-above with vowel-above vs. small-meem-below with vowel-below. So much for the small meem. > Curious, then > what about hamza? The are super and subscript hamza, and then alef > with superscript hamza/subscript hamza. On the other hand, yeh and waw > does not have subscript hamza.So, how we should treat it? Some > recomend not to use it (the yeh with hamza above etc), instead use the > super script hamza/subscript hamza. Hamza's are different from small meems in that they are also used in unvowelled orthography. So even if they were in a rule-based complementary distribution, the conditional information cannot be assumed to be present. > In my font, I think it could handle most of the above cases, that is > regardless you use yeh with super/sub hamza, or yeh with hamza above, > it will render it correctly. That is if you use yeh with hamza above > followed by a kasra, it will give you yeh with hamza below. The same > with waw, with the exception of alef. Or course, it can be done as > well. Like with difference between small meem and hamza in general, yaa+hamza-below only occurs in vocalized qur'anic text in a rule-based complementary distribution against yaa+hamza-above. On the other hand, alif+hamza-above and alif+hamza-above are different from yaa+hamza in that they are also used in unvowelled orthography > So, any suggestion? Well, the least I can suggest is to extend canonical equivalence to the whole range of hamza chairs according to these formulae: <baseletter+hamza-above > = <baseletter><hamza-above> <baseletter+hamza-below > = <baseletter><hamza-below> Regards, t
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