Abdulhaq Lynch wrote: > On Saturday 25 June 2005 10:48, Thomas Milo wrote: >> I am afraid /tamwiim/ or mimation is an innovation I contributed to >> the Arabic Ocean. But unlike /fawaatis/ (plural of /fiits/, the >> Dutch word "fiets", bicycle), this one may get official recognition >> some day. >> >> t > > I'm trying to add haafara yuhaafiru to arabic (meaning to Hoover the > house). Also tatattata (to tut with the tongue). I don't think > they'll catch on.
Tuttutut. Just wat and see. > As I said earlier, these neologisms may be neat but we already have a > lexicon for these things from over a thousand years ago. Arabic as a dead language? > But if it is encoded, will you use the arabic tamweem or the english > meemation? Tamweem. The precedent is Tatweel. > Ultimately I suppose these encodings come down to whether Unicode is > semantic or glyphic, and I take Mete's point that it's supposed to be > scriptic - which sits somewhere between the two I suppose. It aims to encode plain text, whatever that means. In the case of Arabic, I take that to mean "graphemic". This is a kind of "semantic" but limited to abstract units writing: probably what Mete calls scriptic. The reason I think this is in line with the Unicode approach for Arabic is that Unicode rejected the idea of encoding contextual variants or ligatures (the ligature block is their for legacy compatibility only). The term graphemic is coined after Prague School Phonology: like the hierarchy archiphonemes - phonemes - allophones in a sound system, a writing system has archigraphemes - graphemes - allographs. archigrapheme = abstract: the common element(s) between two or more graphemes grapheme = astract: the minimal distinctive unit of writing / conrete: all allographs needed for the contextual representation of the same letter allograph = concrete: rule-based, predictable visual instance or variation of a grapheme / part of a ligature representing a grapheme Unicode should record only record graphemes and archigraphemes. Allographs fall in te domain of font technology. t _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/general
