Arabic ...

Steg,
   your impression of Arabic is basically right.  However there has been
some research in the Arab world (mainly 40-50s , then resurrected in the
90s) that is interested in simplifying Arabic script and/or bridging teh
gap between Fusha and Modern Spoken.  I have been working on this
personally for a few years but have been able to publish only little on it
since I was working on other things at the time.  My apporach focusses on
creating spelling rules that bridge teh gap between the written form of
say Palestinian/Levantinbe and Fusha but are (the rules) based on teh
morphophonemic nature of Palestinian/Levantine.  To that extent, I use
diacritics (not to be confused with the short-vowel diacritics in
Arabic) to distinguish between to forms of Waw and Yaa and thus expanding
the three long vowel characters in Arabic script to deal with the five
vowels of Palestinian (some of this is inspired by Kurdish
particulary).

When I have more stuff formally written on this I will send you a link to
it.

Nizar



On Sat, 21 Apr 2001 03:25:17 -0400 "Nizar Y.A. Habash"
<habash@...> writes:
> Not really.  That was part of the beauty of Nuun:  I was able to do
> a dynamic font
> implementation for Arabic before Typograph was able to deal with
> Arabic character sets
> (problem is many glyph to single character mapping ).  So I used a
> simpler encoding
> and designed the font layout myself.  I have a version including
> some special characters
> (a couple of which are not in the Arabic Unicode set that I have
> invented to write
> Palestinian Arabic as part of an ongoing project of mine I intend to
> publish (hopefully soon after I am done with graduate school).
> Nizar
-

-
>What are these characters?  I was under the impression that all Arabic
>dialects write in 'Standard' and not necessarily the way they talk.