Kashmiri

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

Plain vowels

Complex sounds

Consonant sounds

	labial	dental	alveolar	post- alveolar	retroflex	palatal	velar	glottal
stops	p b	t d			ʈ ɖ		k ɡ
aspirated	pʰ	tʰ			ʈʰ		kʰ
affricates		t͡s		t͡ʃ d͡ʒ
aspirated		t͡sʰ		t͡ʃʰ
fricatives			s z	ʃ				h
nasals	m		n
approximants	w		l			j
trills/flaps			r

Tone

Kashmiri is not a tonal language.

Structure

The most common sylllable structure for Kashmiri is.

C (M) V (C)

Vowels can be short or long, and may be nasalised. Syllable-initial and syllable-final consonants can be palatalised.

A spoken syllable can also begin with a vowel, but word-initial vowels are preceded in writing by 0627 (or sometimes 0639). It is relatively common for a syllable to end with a diphthong, terminated by -j.

Medial consonants are -r and, less common, -j.

Vowel summary table

The following table summarises the main vowel to character assigments.

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). Click/tap on items to see a list of the components for that cell.

Observation: Several items in the Kashmiri dictionary end with a vowel followed by h. Is this the standard way to write word-final short vowels - and some long ones?

For a question about the ordering of characters in final e, see final_e. For questions about whether to use precomposed or decomposed letters, see encoding.

Below is the full set of characters needed to represent the Kashmiri vowels, including decompositions and compositions. Several of the characters are used in combinations to represent a given vowel sound, in a given position. Whether a vowel is represented using a precomposed or decomposed form is not straightforward (see encoding).

Vowel basics

Standalone vowels

Word-initial standalone vowels always begin with ا or (for loan words) ع, either as a carrier for a diacritic, or before the other characters that represent the vowel.
 

اوٚنْگٕج

اِنسان

آتھوار

عَکٕس

عٲقٟل

Characters to avoid

The Unicode character ٳ [U+0673 ARABIC LETTER ALEF WITH WAVY HAMZA BELOW] is explicitly deprecated by the Standard in favour of the decomposed sequence اٟ [U+0627 ARABIC LETTER ALEF + U+065F ARABIC WAVY HAMZA BELOW]. There is no normalisation equivalence.

The list above contains several other single Unicode code points that look like combinations of Kashmiri letters and vowel diacritics, but they neither decompose nor recompose during normalisation. The Unicode Standard descriptions for these characters indicate that they are intended for use with specific languages, and Kashmiri is not listed amongst those. The hamza in these characters is an ijam, rather than a vowel diacritic, ie. it is an integral part of the letter. See Ijam, tashkil, hamza.

Nevertheless, they may appear in Kashmiri text – for example, ۆ [U+06C6 ARABIC LETTER OE] is the default encoding for the vowel o in Wiktionary's list of words.

Content authors should use the decomposed forms, but because that can't be guaranteed, applications need to apply special rules to recognise both precomposed and decomposed forms as equivalent. See non_canonical for more details.

Vowel absence

This is an alphabetic script, so there is no inherent vowel to suppress, and consonant clusters in Kashmiri are typically not marked in any way, nor are word-final consonants.

There are, however, 2 exceptions: medial consonants, and syllable-final nasals.

Medials. The letters representing -r and -j in syllable onsets are marked with 0652 (jazm). In an orthography such as Urdu the jazm is attached to the consonant which is not followed by a vowel, however in this case the jazm goes above the medial consonant, not the initial consonant. These medial letters can therefore be associated with both a jazm and a vowel diacritic. This behaviour is explicitly described in Rainamkr,p11-12 and occurs in Wiktionary lemmas.

کرْٕم

See onsets for more details.

Syllable-final nasals. The jazm diacritic is also used with a syllable-final ن when it is immediately followed by a consonant sound. In this case, the jazm sits above the letter representing the nasal sound (unlike the medial case just described).

وانْدُر

کانْتُر

Choice of code point. Note that Kashmiri uses an inverted-v shape for the jazm, rather than the small round circle used for the sukun in Arabic language orthographies. However, the semantics are the same, and so is the code point.

Note that this is NOT   ٛ   [U+065B ARABIC VOWEL SIGN INVERTED SMALL V ABOVE]. That character is used as a vowel diacritic, eg. to write the letter o in Fulfulde. The ARABIC SUKUN code point has the semantic meaning intended here, and is also used for this function in Standard Arabic, Persian, Urdu, etc.. For Kashmiri you should use a font that produces the expected glyph shape. Using a different character that has the same shape but not the same semantics will cause problems for interoperable use of your text, and some fonts may fail to display it correctly (see confusables).

Vowel sounds to characters

This section maps Kashmiri vowel sounds to common graphemes in the Arabic orthography. The allocation of characters to vowel sounds is somewhat complicated. The complexity arises from the number of vowels in Kashmiri compared to the Arabic language, and the need to represent them all, but also because different sequences are needed for different positional forms. In addition, often more than one character sequence can achieve the same result.

Vowels in word-initial position or written alone are written with a preceding ا [U+0627 ARABIC LETTER ALEF], or sometimes ع (we use the former for this table).

The columns run right to left and indicate typical word-initial, word-medial, and word-final usage. The joining forms shown are illustrative; alternatives may occur (see joining_forms).

Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.

Consonant summary table

The following table summarises the main consonant to character assigments.

The consonants in the right column map mostly to the same phonemes, but are generally for loan words and to preserve the original spellings in the language of origin.

For additional details see consonant_mappings.

Basic consonants

The following constitute a basic set of consonants used for Kashmiri, that cover all standard phonemes for the Kashmiri language.

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).

Aspirated consonants

Six additional letters of the alphabet represent aspirated sounds. These are all written by combining a standard character with a following ھ [U+06BE ARABIC LETTER HEH DOACHASHMEE].

Additional consonants

The following set of consonants map mostly to the same phonemes, but are generally for loan words and preserve the original spellings in the language of origin.

Palatalisation

Palatalisation is a frequent feature of Kashmiri words. It is represented using ؠ [U+0620 ARABIC LETTER KASHMIRI YEH] after the consonant to be palatalised. Medial forms have a small circle beneath them. These changes follow the same pattern as 06CC, which has 2 dots below initial and medial forms, but no dots below final and isolate forms.

The form with a circle below occurs as part of a syllable onset. The final/isolate form appears with a syllable coda.

بؠنتھٕر

وَہؠکھ

پونؠ

کٲڈؠ

When palatalisation is applied to the coda of a syllable within a lexical item, the swash form is always used. To produce this, it can be followed by a space or a zero-width non-joiner. It is common for single lexical items to be split in Kashmiri.

ۂسؠ تِنؠ

کھٔرؠ پھٕ

Onsets

When ر is used as a medial consonant, Kashmiri puts the jazm over the -r rather than over the initial consonant. This leads to situations where the base character carries both a sukun and a vowel diacritic, which is very unusual for Arabic script orthographies.

برَْگ

کرُْہُن

The same applies for the medial -j, written using ی.

بیْٲر

کیْوٚم

There are words where ر and ی follow a consonant but do not have a jazm above. Presumably this is because they form the onset of a new syllable after the coda of the previous syllable. For example:

نَزرانٕہ

Finals

With one exception, there are no special letters for syllable-final consonants. They are not marked using the sukun mark.

بادَم

The exception is the use of ں (rather than ن) to indicate word-final nasalisation. See nasalisation for more details.

اٟں

Consonant clusters

Kashmiri uses   ْ   [U+0652 ARABIC SUKUN] (jazm) to indicate some consonant clusters, as described in novowel. In general, however, clusters are just represented by a sequence of unmarked consonants.

بابتھٕر

Gemination

The diacritic ّ  [U+0651 ARABIC SHADDA] doubles the value of the consonant it is attached to.

Observation: It's not clear that this is used for Kashmiri.

Consonant sounds to characters

This section maps Kashmiri consonant sounds to common graphemes in the Arabic orthography.

Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.

Sounds listed as 'infrequent' are allophones, or sounds used for foreign words, etc.

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

Honorifics

0614 is a sign placed over the name or nom-de-plume of a poet, or in some writings used to mark all proper names.

The mark is really associated with a word, rather than a character, but the placement is left to the user. The mark is often added somewhere in the middle of a name, but commonly appears towards the end. This depends to some extent on the letter shapes present and the calligraphic style in use, eg.

عطاشادؔ ataː ʃaː Ata Shad (author's name)

Canonically equivalent alternatives

Normalisation converts the following precomposed to decomposed alternatives, and vice versa.

The single code point per vowel-sign is the form preferred by the Unicode Standard and the form in common use for Kashmiri. The parts are separated in Unicode Normalisation Form D (NFD), and recomposed in Unicode Normalisation Form C (NFC), so both approaches are canonically equivalent.

Alternatives that are not canonically equivalent

The following alternatives are not converted to each other during normalisation. The diacritics in the precomposed characters are ijam, whereas those in the decomposed sequences are tashkil.

Confusables & spelling errors

The following lists some common errors found in Kashmiri text due to the similarity of Unicode characters, or perhaps sometimes due to problems inputting the correct character. Wikipedia is a rich source of such.

Diacritic placement

Digits

The Unicode Arabic block has 2 sets of digits, and Kashmiri uses the extended set. The Unicode bidi_class property for these native digits is European_Number, which makes them behave and look differently from the digits used for Arabic language text. For more information, see expressions.

In addition, there are differences in glyph shapes. fig_number_shapes shows the different glyph shapes used in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Sindhi. Kashmiri digits share the same shapes as those for Urdu.u,370

Arabic
Persian
Urdu
Sindi

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.

‫ [U+202B RIGHT-TO-LEFT EMBEDDING] (RLE), ‪ [U+202A LEFT-TO-RIGHT EMBEDDING] (LRE), and ‬ [U+202C POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING] (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 ⁧ [U+2067 RIGHT-TO-LEFT ISOLATE] (RLI), ⁦ [U+2066 LEFT-TO-RIGHT ISOLATE] (LRI), and ⁩ [U+2069 POP DIRECTIONAL ISOLATE] (PDI). The Unicode Standard recommends that these be used instead.

There is also ⁨ [U+2068 FIRST STRONG ISOLATE] (FSI), used initially to set the base direction according to the first recognised strongly-directional character.

؜ [U+061C ARABIC LETTER MARK] (ALM) is used to produce correct sequencing of numeric data. Follow the link and see expressions for details. 

‏ [U+200F RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK] (RLM) and ‎ [U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK] (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.

Expressions & sequences

A sequence of numbers used to express a range of values generally runs right to left in the Arabic language (and languages using the Thaana or Syriac scripts), whereas for Persian language text (and in Hebrew, N’Ko or Adlam scripts) it runs left to right.

For more information, see the section Expressions & sequences in the Arabic script notes.

Cursive script

Arabic script is always cursive, ie. letters in a word are joined up. Fonts need to produce the appropriate glyph 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, however some letters never join to the left. Ligated forms also join with characters alongside them.

In the lists below 30 Kashmiri letters are dual-joining, whereas 17 join only to the right. However, the high frequency of the latter and short word lengths produce text that doesn't usually have long joined sequences (see fig_unjoined).

Word boundaries

tbd

Words are separated by spaces.

Graphemes

Phrase & section boundaries

Kashmiri 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 more common ones.

(␣)␣<␣>␣[␣]␣{␣}␣«␣»␣‹␣›

Quotations & citations

Kashmiri texts use quotation marks around quotations. Of course, due to keyboard design, quotations may also be surrounded by ASCII double and single quote marks. Note, however, that the order of use is different from that in LTR text, because they are not automatically mirrored.

Quote marks are ” [U+201D RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK] at the start, and “ [U+201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK] at the end.

Unlike the bracketing quotation marks, these characters are not mirrored during display. This means that LEFT means use on the left, and RIGHT means use on the right.

Line breaking & hyphenation

Lines are normally broken at word boundaries. They are not broken at the small gaps that appear where a character doesn't join on the left.

Like most writing systems, certain characters are expected not to start or end a line. For example, periods and commas shouldn't start a line, and opening parentheses shouldn't end a line.

Show (default) line-breaking properties for characters in the modern Kashmiri orthography.

Baselines, line height, etc.

tbd

The nastaliq writing style uses arrangements of joined glyphs that cascade downwards from right to left, and ressemble a strongly sloping baseline.

An obvious consequence is that the height of inline text in Kashimiri travel much further from the baseline than is usual in Latin script text. Allowances for this need to be made for line height settings on a page, but also it can be problematic when combining Latin and Arabic text on the same line using different fonts for each.

If the Arabic font supports the needed Latin letters, the font design will already take into account the relative sizes of the letters, and their placement relative to the baselines of each script. If different fonts are used, though, it's important to match the baselines and harmonise the font sizes used.

General page layout & progression

Kashmiri books, magazines, etc., are bound on the right-hand side, and pages progress from right to left.

Columns are vertical but run right-to-left across the page.

Grids & tables

Tables, grids, and other 2-dimensional arrangements progress from right to left across a page.

Forms & user interaction

Form controls should display Kashmiri text from right to left, starting at the right side of the input field. Form controls should also usually be arranged from right to left.

fig_form shows some form fields from an Arabic language web page. The same principles apply for Kashmiri. Note the position of the labels relative to the input fields and the checkbox, mirror-imaging a similar page in English. Note also that the input text in the first field appears to the right of the box.

The position of a scrollbar should depend on the user's environment, not on the content of a page. A non-Arab user viewing a web page in Arabic shouldn't have to look for the scroll bar on the left side of the window. In a system that is set up for an Arab user, however, the scrollbar can appear on the left.