Thireefili: An experiment in removing the bottom diacritics in Thaana
This follows from a little chat Hamid Shafeeu and I had last night. Hamid suggested that the vowel diacritics written on the bottom of the letters in Thaana, the “ibifili” and “eebeefili”, should be moved to the top to make the writing look cleaner (and other reasons he offered that I can’t remember now). Anyway, the move requires minor changes and should be pretty apparent and easy to learn.
I’ve altered the FDL licensed ”Thaana Unicode Akeh” font by “MITF” to bring the ibifili and eebeefili to the top and laterally inverted them to differentiate from the abafili and aabaafili vowel diacritics. The resulting font which I’ve called “ThireeFili”, is available for download below. The font is free and is released under the Free Documentation License which it’s ancestor follows.
I do not particularly like how the two new fili looks but I think moving the bottom diacritics to the top definitely brings a readability improvement. What are your thoughts?
- ThireeFili TrueType font (Thireefili.ttf) - 19.3 KB
This post was originally published in Jaa‘s own blog on July 28th 2012.
NOn sense
Looks better i must say, will need some getting used to though.
The thiriee fili is a project that would definitely make the thaana look good on web. but a little getting used to is needed. We may feel and accept such a move is necessary however there are a lot of people we would need to convince inorder for such a change be considered official and accepted nationally.
Another such change everyone in this industry would welcome is removal of apostrophe when writing Male’ . We should consider a change like Maale instead.
this is a very interesting idea. perhaps its time for the thaana alphabet to evolve to be more ‘computer friendly’ and this would certainly be in that direction.
Absolutely better !
i can’t understand why the thaana script needs to change just so that it’d look good on a computer screen. it just doesn’t mean anything to me. well, its quite stupid actually.
let thanna scripts be as it is….
Its a gud idea! Bringing it to the mainstream would be challenging as it loses the scrip loses its identity…