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.
Cheers, Ferren
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(Dr) Ferren MacIntyre
1 ch. des Echarts
Campagne sur Aude
11260 France
+33 (0) 468 748870
(GMT+1), although I'm only 2° off the Greenwich meridian, this is France we're talking about.
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