Yeah, a lot of languages have a history of Arabic-script literacy which is far less studied than Ajami. Dongxiang (aka Sarta, a Mongolic language) comes to mind --- "Dongxiang Xiao'erjing" manuscripts are almost completely ignored among Anglophone scholars, and the only publications about it are in obscure regional journals in Gansu. Certainly no one has taken advantage of them to do diachronic studies of the language or literary criticism, as has been done for Wolofal [1] ...
Digitisation of all these kinds of Arabic-script manuscripts would be somewhat easier if the Arabic block in Unicode had more combining marks, the way the Latin and Cyrillic blocks have done for pretty much all the various tails and tildes and slash marks.
Digitisation of all these kinds of Arabic-script manuscripts would be somewhat easier if the Arabic block in Unicode had more combining marks, the way the Latin and Cyrillic blocks have done for pretty much all the various tails and tildes and slash marks.
[1] e.g. http://www.jstor.org/pss/3821001 http://www.reference-global.com/doi/abs/10.1515/ijsl.2002.05...