Roozbeh wrote:
> Because of the different cultures, the Persian
> handwriting is somehow different from Arabic.
> [...] So I have never been exposed to a
> handwriting of someone of Arabic origin.
Here in Italy we are not very much exposed to Arabic handwriting at all. But
that little Arabic one sees in the roads (shop signs, posters by immigrants
associations, multilingual municipal notices, etc.) is mostly written by
North Africans hands (especially Moroccans) or Italians who learnt Arabic in
those areas.
> As I told, it shouldn't be any kind of Kaf. Neither
> U+0643, nor U+06A9, nor U+06AA. In my eye.
> And I can't guess what it really is. But again it
> may be Kaf, as I don't know how the Arabic language
> people write that in handwriting.
I think it is a Kaf followed by an Alif. You are certainly right that this
ligature is not used in Farsi (I opened an Iranian font, and there is no
trace of it); probably it is not very common even in Arabic typography in
general.
However, I always see it in the handwritten documents by North African
people. It looks like a lowercase "b" with an acute accent, or an
upside-down mirrored capital "R". Oh! a picture is better than many words:
see it attached (notice: it is handwritten by me so clearly not very
faithful to the originals I might have seen).
BTW, it is also in Unicode's "presentation glyphs" at number U+FC37.
So, a possible tentative reading for the words in the red square is
something like "hikâ hangnû". Does it make any sense in Cebuano, Malay or
other languages?
_ Marco