99 bottles of BEEH on the wall (aka Australian for BEEH)

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/10/04 08:31 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/10/04/5270367.aspx

In a comment to mini-Office diatribe of a blog post I wrote entitled Turn on Arabic everywhere if you ever turned it on anywhere?, which was sponsored by ٻ (U+067b, a.k.a. ARABIC LETTER BEEH), someone by the nom de plume of AAA commented:

beeh has one dot not two... that more like a ¨ya¨ but dots need to be side by side not up n down

My first thought when I saw this was that of course I am just putting bytes on a web page, and thus have no control over the actual dots there -- that is something for the fonts.

My second thought was some self-doubt, maybe I had put the wrong bits on the page?

So I checked -- and no, it was indeed U+067b, just as I wanted it to be.

so I tried it in a bunch of fonts:

And they all showed two dots, one atop the other.

Then I looked at the various forms of the letter in Unicode:

ٻ    U+067b (ARABIC LETTER BEEH)

ﭒ    U+fbf2 (ARABIC LETTER BEEH ISOLATED FORM)

ﭓ    U+fbf3 (ARABIC LETTER BEEH FINAL FORM)

ﭔ    U+fbf4 (ARABIC LETTER BEEH INITIAL FORM)

ﭕ    U+fbf5 (ARABIC LETTER BEEH MEDIAL FORM)

And they all seemed to have two dots, too!

So finally I looked in the Unicode code charts, in both the Arabic block and the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block, and they all had two dots underneath, one over the other.

Then Marc Durdin of Tavultesoft fame suggested that AAA was thinking of ب (U+0628, a.k.a. ARABIC LETTER BEH), rather than BEEH (the latter is used in Sindhi).

I took a moment to growl at whatever forces in the universe had me feeling like it was appropriate to doubt myself and let the crotchety old man reintegrate himself into my persona, and then signaled the Australian barman.

He asked me "Gidday mate. Wanna beeh?"

If you don't know who this post is sponsored by, then you probably weren't reading it very closely. Or maybe you had too much Beeh (and Australian Beeh, not that American kind which they feel is like making love in a canoe -- in other words fucking close to water)

# Arun Philip on 5 Oct 2007 9:16 AM:

zeph on 28 Oct 2008 9:24 AM:

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