Quoting CE Whitehead <cewcat...@hotmail.com>:
'g' is a non-Arabic sound ... and there is no "g" in Standard Arabic although there are two ways to write it ...
Oh, there are many more than two ways to write the [g] sound in Arabic. Standard Arabic traditionally transcribes foreign [g] as ghain U+063A, as in Granada. But particular locales have devised their own characters:
Morocco: kaf with 3 dots U+0763, as in Agadir: http://www.casafree.com/modules/xcgal/albums/userpics/10070/normal_DSCN5410.JPG
Tunisia: qaf with 3 dots U+06A8, as in Gafsa: http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/LuXuS3000/Tunisia%20Airliners/Gafsa-Ksar.jpg
Israel: jeem with 3 dots U+0686, as in Giv'at Shemuel: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/62/Givat_shmuel_sign.png
Then there are dialects of Arabic that do have the [g] sound -- in Egypt jeem U+062C is pronunced as [g] (think of Gamal Abdel Nasser), and in many other places qaf U+0642 is pronounced as [g] (think of Muammar al-Gaddafi). And that's just Arabic...
Persian and Urdu write [g] using a kaf character with a line above U+06AF, while Pashto uses kaf with a ring U+06AB. It really should be that simple. You might expect a substitution if someone does not have a character in their font or doesn't know how to access it from a keyboard. However, I noticed the Persian character alongside the Pashto one inside a single Pashto document, and that's just strange.
-Ron.
