Hebrew has this "confusion" too. The consonant aleph is a glottal stop (like "bottle" pronounced with heavy Cockney accent "bo'el") and represented by the little raised backwards c. The consonant ayin is a so-called guttural, made like a hard g but in the throat rather than the mouth (hence Gaza in English), and represented by the little raised c. Simi ————————————————————— Simeon Chavel Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible The University of Chicago Divinity School 1025 E. 58th St. Chicago, IL 60637 tel.: +1.773.702.6387 fax: +1.773.702.6048 http://divinity.uchicago.edu/faculty/chavel.shtml ————————————————————— On Jan 7, 2012, at 7:28 AM, Ferren MacIntyre wrote: > My problem with hamza is not so much *typing* it, as figuring out what it is. The one in Qur'an gets written to look like both a 'c' and a reversed 'c' in different places, but these (as I understand things) are really 2 different characters. The glyphs in Characer Viewer are so numerous and variable that they leave this Arabic-illiterate baffled. I don't wan't to use a single quote, because I find it necessary to switch between 'Educate Quotes' and 'Straighten Quotes' when using Find&Replace to insert unicode gobbledogook. What *is* that thing in Qur'an? It is often written differently from the one in 'Umar. Surely somebody on this list knows about these arcane matters! > > Cheers, > > Ferren > =================== > (Dr) Ferren MacIntyre > 1 ch. des Echarts > Campagne sur Aude > 11260 France > +33 (0) 468 748870 > =================== > MacBook Pro 5,1; 2.4GHz, 4GB > OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard > >> On 04.01.2012, at 11:16, Knut S. Vikør wrote: >> >>> Unfortunately, these two are not among the characters you can type with >>> the US Extended keyboard, so you are forced to use Character Viewer, >>> unless you hav PopChar or one of the more spcialized keyboard layouts >>> that let you type it directly >> >> Why not use the inbuilt Nisus Glossary feature to accomplish things like >> that? One could assign a simple abbreviation (such as "c9") to a glossary >> entry and when typed it would then be expanded immediately, giving you >> the character you are looking for. That would be a bit faster than having >> to grab the mouse and then look for the character in PopChar. The same >> could be achieved system wide with Typinator (or any other glossary >> tool). >> >> Þorvarður >> ******************************************************** > > ____________________________________________________________ > Receive Notifications of Incoming Messages > Easily monitor multiple email accounts & access them with a click. > Visit http://www.inbox.com/notifier and check it out!