[arabic-vip] ZWNJ (earlier: [vip] Overarching principles used in Devanagari team report)

[Behnam Esfahbod]

Dear Raed,


On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 7:09 AM, Raed Al-Fayez <rfayez at citc.gov.sa> wrote:

>  I want to add to Manal points that we (as an Arabic language community)
> don't know/use the ZWJ & ZWNJ ( we can't type them using our keyboards even
> if they are enabled).
>
I think we agreed on excluding ZWJ already.

As for ZWNJ, I know that it is not used in Arabic language. But that
shouldn't mean that it shouldn't be used. Clearly there are a lot of
characters in Unicode's Arabic script that are not used in Persian language.

As for typing them using keyboard, you can do that indeed. In Windows 7,
activate the "Arabic (Saudi Arabia)" keyboard and try Ctrl+Shift+2. This is
the same method people should type in using Microsoft's Persian keyboard
layout, which means that a Persian-speaking use can actually type ZWNJ using
the Arabic keyboard!

Personally I feel that these two control points can add serious risk to the
> internet users.
>
More details please?


>  BTW we as Arabic language users use the space to separate words however
> it is blocked form domain names and we are forced to use the Hyphen (-) as a
> word separator even that it is not the best option but we some kind
> understand the reasons for not enabling it. And I believe the number of
> languages in the internet that is affected from blocking the space is very
> large.****
>
> So I think if the group is going to support ZWNJ and/or ZWJ in TLDs(because
> it may be needed by other languages) then we should also ask to
> support/reconsider the support of the space in TLDs and even more in all
> Internet Standards (IDNA RFC, DOMAIN RFC ..etc). Also if the group is going
> to support them in the TLD then we should add a warning that they  may
> cause  a risk and ICANN should study this topic carefully.
>
Space is used in Persian language (and AFAIK all of Arabic-script-based
languages) very similar to how they are used in Arabic language. Did anyone
ask for allowing Space in TLDs here? I don't think so.

If it is going to be simply excluding a character because it's not used in
one language, we would end up with a few (maybe less than 20) letters, which
would make the TLDs broken for all the languages in this group.

I think this approach doesn't not help the team to reach any consensus. We
are supposed to respect the fact that Arabic script has been developed and
evolved during centuries in various geolocations by different group of
people and the each of these groups has made changes to the script to adapt
it to their needs. The fact that Unicode standard calls it "Arabic script"
is only because "Arabic language" has the majority in using this script, and
whether some character is used in Arabic language or not cannot be
considered a measure in governing the issues regarding this script.

Best regards,
-Behnam

-- 
    '     بهنام اسفهبد
    '     Behnam Esfahbod
   '      http://behnam.esfahbod.info
  *  ..   http://zwnj.org/
 *  `  *  http://persian-computing.ir
  * o *   3E7F B4B6 6F4C A8AB 9BB9 7520 5701 CA40 259E 0F8B
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