Ferren MacIntyre wrote:
> I am out of my depth here. Cristoph Luxenberg (remember him? Muslims get
> 70 white grapes, not virgins? /Hur/, not /houri/.) says parts of the
> Quran seem to have been written in 'Syro-Aramaic', because /hapax
> legomena/ disappear when /ayn/ and /lam/ are exchanged. Somebody
> corrected Luxenberg, saying it wasn't Syro-Aramaic, but just Syriac.
>
> I succeeded, at least partially, in installing a Syriac font (one of the
> SyrCOMxxx.otf suite out of melthofonts-1.21). It display an alphabet
> with scattered Cyrillic characters, clearly not what I am looking for. I
> have seen 'Syriac' fonts with Arabic-style characters, which is what I
> need, so clearly, Syriac covers more territory than I can deal with
> intelligently. What I am looking for is perhaps related to Hatra, the
> almost-Fertile-Crescent site that ISIS just bulldozed.
>
> Can any of you linguists sort me out here? the characters I am looking
> are fundamentally the right side and base of triangles, /lam/ tall and
> /ayn/ short, and so easy to confuse in mss

Hello Ferren - Have been looking into my font library, but strangely 
enough I don't have any Syriac fonts among the more than 300.000 fonts I 
have in the library...

But I found this one on the net. Maybe it can be useful. It's an OTF 
font, so doesn't need any kind of conversion before installing, and it 
seems to be freeware/donateware. Just double-click it and FontViewer 
opens and you can add the font.

<http://www.bethmardutho.org/index.php/syriac-mac/51.html>

Click on 'Download Fonts' and both font and instructions / userguide are 
available.

HTH. Cheers, Erik Richard

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Erik Richard Sørensen, Member of ADC, <[log in to unmask]>
NisusWriter - The Future In Multilingual Text Processing - www.nisus.com
Openoffice.org - The Modern Productivity Solution - www.openoffice.org
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