Re: African languages in Arabic script?

Nearly two years later ... it would be interesting to know what
became of the project, and indeed what languages were involved.
There are apparently often variations among and even within languages
on the character forms used.

A brief list of characters may be of interest to those working on
Ajami / extended-Arabic - see
http://www.quicktopic.com/18/D/y4dBcRx9hQWK.html for link to the .pdf
document and spaces for comment. Comments on usage and form are
sought. TIA...

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net

(NB- This is in response to message 231; other responses were nos.
232 & 235)

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Bob_Hallissy@... wrote:
> Do any of you have any knowledge of how Arabic script has been
adapted to
> African languages?
>
> I have a question from someone who wants to know how they should
write
> prenasalization and more than 3 vowels in Arabic script. Below is an
> excerpt from his message to me.
>
> If you have any knowledge of other languages that have coped with
these
> issues, or perhaps some resources where some of these issues are
discussed,
> I would be grateful for the input.
>
> TIA,
>
> Bob
>
> <excerpt>
> We would like to write in Arabic script, but found the characters
> furnished by Unicode slightly awkward: They provide plenty of
> variations for some characters, sometimes even overload them with
dots
> and things (like for kaf), but no variation whatsoever for others
> (like mim). And especially, I couldn't find possibilities for vowels
> (we need e and o [in addition to a u i], both long and short). Our
biggest
> problems besides the vowels are to find a possibility to represent
mb
> (prenasalized b) and ny (palatal nasal).
>
> Our folks would like to avoid combinations of consonants (like mim
and
> ba following each other to represent mb) as well as "re-"using
> unneeded characters of Standard Arabic (as that would necessitate
> re-learning when the person wants to make the transition from
reading
> the mother tongue to Standard Arabic).
>
> So what we would really like is a mim with a dot underneath for mb
and
> something like possibly a nun with a little v above for ny. The
> problem with the latter though is that we also look at the little v
> above a consonant to represent the short e (and the little hat above
> for the short o, the prolonged forms with ya and waw respectively).
> </excerpt>