Sorani (draft)

Joining forms

Because the Arabic script is 'cursive' (ie. joined-up) writing, letters tend to have different shapes depending on whether they join with adjacent letters or not (see cursive). In addition, vowels can be represented using different characters, depending on where in a word they appear.

In scripts such as Arabic, several characters have no left-joining form. In what follows we'll use the characters ي and د to illustrate shapes. The former can join on both sides, but the latter can only join on the right.

Left-joining glyphs are commonly called initial; dual-joining are called medial; and right-joining are called final. Glyphs that don't join on either side are called isolated. However, these glyph shapes can be found in various places within a single word.

Word-initial characters usually have initial glyph shapes (eg. 064A ). However, characters that only join to the right will use an isolated glyph shape (eg. 062F ). Furthermore, words beginning with a vowel are always preceded by a vowel carrier, which is normally ا (eg. 0627 06CC or 0627 064E ).

Word-medial characters will typically join on both sides (eg. 064A ) but those that only join to the right will use a final glyph (eg. 062F ). However, if either of those is preceded by another character that only joins to the right, the glyph shapes rendered will be initial (eg. 064A ) and isolated (eg. 062F ), respectively.

Word-final characters will typically use a final glyph shape (eg. 064A and 062F ). However, if the previous character joins only to the right, they will use isolated glyph shapes (eg.064A and 062F ).

In all this contextual glyph shaping the basic shapes used for a character can vary significantly in a script like Arabic. This also includes some characters that only have ijam dots in certain contexts.

Letters

Combining marks

Numbers

Punctuation

Other

Vowel sounds

Consonant sounds

	labial	alveolar	post- alveolar	palatal	velar	uvular	pharyngeal	glottal
stop	p b	t d			k ɡ	q		ʔ
affricate			t͡ʃ d͡ʒ
fricative	f v	s z	ʃ ʒ		x ɣ	χ	ħ ʕ	h
nasal	m	n			ŋ
approximant	w	l ɫ		j
trill/flap		r ɾ

The velar consonants tend to be palatalised before i and e.ua

The sounds ħ and ʕ are the result of Arabic influence on pronunciation, and are most often heard outside of Iran. They are not necessarily used for loan words. The word حەوت is commonly pronounced using ħ.

Tone

Sorani is not a tonal language.

Structure

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Vowel summary table

The following table summarises the main vowel to character assigments.

ⓘ represents the unwritten vowel. Each table cell shows word-initial, word-medial, and word-final forms from right to left. The glyphs shown are illustrative; alternative shapes may occur (see joining_forms).

For additional details see vowel_mappings.

Unwritten vowel

The vowel sound ə~ɪ is not written in Sorani text. This is similar to the way Armenian doesn't write the sound ə, and means that Sorani isn't a perfect alphabet.

مرۆڤ

سفر

وشک

مامر

Vowel letters

All written Sorani vowels use letters. Those letters do not decompose, so there are no combining marks involved.

Sorani uses 4 dedicated vowel letters and 2 consonants to write the 7 post-consonant vowel sounds (plus some contextual variants of æ). The long vowel uː is represented by a doubled WAW digraph (وو).

Standalone vowels

Word-initial standalone vowels are preceded by ئ.

ئافرەت

ئەمڕۆ

ئێرانی

Vowel sounds to characters

Consonant summary table

The following table summarises the main consonant to character assigments.

For additional details see consonant_mappings.

Basic consonants

Whereas the table just above takes you from sounds to letters, the following simply lists the basic consonant letters (however, since the orthography is highly phonetic there is little difference in ordering).

The list above includes 2 letters for the sound h because some texts use one, whereas some use the other. For more information, see unresolved_encoding.

Non-standard letters

The letters in the list below represent dialectal or other poorly attested alternative forms of the Soraní alphabet extensionsu15,397.

See also encoding for alternative code points used in some texts.

Onsets

Sorani syllables may begin with a consonant followed by a j or w glide. These are written using the ordinary consonants ی and و.

پیاو

ژوان

Consonant clusters

Sorani doesn't use any special features to deal with consonant clusters, or syllable-final consonants. There are no conjuncts, and 0652 is not used to indicate vowel absence.

ئاشتی

زانستگە

A little care needs to be exercised, however, when reading, since Sorani has an unwritten vowel ɪ, which may occur, unmarked, between consonants. For example, compare:

ئەمڕۆ

مرۆڤ

Consonant sounds to characters

Formatting characters

Arabic script text makes use of a relatively large set of invisible formatting characters, especially in plain text, many of which are used to manage text direction. Descriptions of these characters can be found in the following sections:

• shapingcontrols
• directioncontrols

Presentation Forms

The code points in the Unicode blocks Arabic Presentation Forms-A and Arabic Presentation Forms-B provide positional forms of Arabic letters and ligatures. They should not be used for ordinary text. Those code points are provided for compatibility with legacy code pages, and have (compatibility) character decomposition mappings. Normally, Arabic text should be written with code points from the main Arabic block and its extensions; positional forms are dealt with by the font and rendering algorithms.

For more information see the Arabic orthography notes.

Canonically equivalent encodings

One letter only can be represented as an atomic character (the norm), or as a sequence of base letter plus combining mark. The parts are separated in Unicode Normalisation Form D (NFD), and recomposed in Unicode Normalisation Form C (NFC), so both approaches should be treated as canonically equivalent.

Note that the base character in the decomposed sequence is 064A, and not 06CC, which is used elsewhere for yeh in Kurmanji. 064A is only used for this specific decomposed sequence; it is inappropriate to use it elsewhere in Kurmanji text.

Unresolved encodings

A couple of Sorani letters are encoded in different ways in different texts, and in fact can be mixed within the same text. At the moment there doesn't appear to be a clear ruling on which is expected. This section lists the alternatives.

Confusables & spelling errors

This table lists characters that are often mistakenly used because they look the same as or similar to the code points used for Kurmanji, or perhaps because the correct character is not available on the user's keyboard.

False friends

The following atomic characters look as if they could be composed of parts, but in fact there is no equivalence during normalisation, and so the atomic characters only should be used.

Codepoint sequences

Combining marks always follow the based character, however for Sorani, which doesn't normally use combining marks, this is only relevant for ێ when it occurs in decomposed text.

Digits

Sorani uses the set of native digits from the extended Arabic range, but most modern texts appear to use ASCII digits much of the time.

Managing text direction

Unicode provides a set of 10 formatting characters that can be used to control the direction of text when displayed. These characters have no visual form in the rendered text, however text editing applications may have a way to show their location.

202B (RLE), 202A (LRE), and 202C (PDF) are in widespread use to set the base direction of a range of characters. RLE/LRE comes at the start, and PDF at the end of a range of characters for which the base direction is to be set.

In Unicode 6.1, the Unicode Standard added a set of characters which do the same thing but also isolate the content from surrounding characters, in order to avoid spillover effects. They are 2067 (RLI), 2066 (LRI), and 2066 (PDI). The Unicode Standard recommends that these be used instead.

There is also 2068 (FSI), used initially to set the base direction according to the first recognised strongly-directional character.

061C (ALM) is used to produce correct sequencing of numeric data. Follow the link and see expressions for details.

200F (RLM) and 200E (LRM) are invisible characters with strong directional properties that are also sometimes used to produce the correct ordering of text.

For more information about how to use these formatting characters see How to use Unicode controls for bidi text. Note, however, that when writing HTML you should generally use markup rather than these control codes. For information about that, see Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts.

Cursive script

Arabic script is always cursive, ie. letters in a word are joined up. Fonts need to produce the appropriate joining form for a letter, according to its visual context, but the code point used doesn't change. This results in four different shapes for most letters (including an isolated shape). Ligated forms also join with characters alongside them.

The highlights in the example below show the same letter, ع, with three different joining forms.

Most Arabic script letters join on both sides. A few only join on the right-hand side: this involves 5 underlying shapes for the Sorani orthography.

Context-based shaping & positioning

See just above for shaping related to cursive joining.

See also the section on glyph shaping in the Arabic orthography notes.

Word boundaries

Words are separated by spaces.

Graphemes

Since there are no combining marks or decompositions in normal Kurmanji text, grapheme clusters correspond to individual characters. Where combining marks appear in decomposed text, the combination of base and combining mark still fits within the definition of a grapheme cluster.

Phrase & section boundaries

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Sorani uses a mixture of ASCII and Arabic punctuation.

Mirrored characters

The words 'left' and 'right' in the Unicode names for parentheses, brackets, and other paired characters should be ignored. LEFT should be read as if it said START, and RIGHT as END. The direction in which the glyphs point will be automatically determined according to the base direction of the text.

The number of characters that are mirrored in this way is around 550, most of which are mathematical symbols. Some are single characters, rather than pairs. The following are some of the more common ones.

(␣)␣<␣>␣[␣]␣{␣}␣«␣»␣‹␣›

Quotations & citations

See type samples.

The following type of quotation mark can be found in Sorani texts. When quoted text appears within quoted text different characters are used, though usually of the same type. (Of course, depending on ease of input, quotations may also be surrounded by ASCII double and single quote marks.)

Unlike brackets, these quote marks are not mirrored during display. As a result, LEFT means use on the left, and RIGHT means use on the right.

Line breaking & hyphenation

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The primary line break opportunity is the space between words.

Baselines, line height, etc.

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Sorani uses the 'alphabetic' baseline.