N2555
Hello, the proposal N2555 titled Revised proposal for encoding the Glagolitic script in the UCS by Michael Everson and Ralph Cleminson contains a number of inaccuracies and errors according to my source. Is it the most up-to-date version of the document? Alexander -- Alexander Savenkovhttp://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
Re[2]: Writing Tatar using the Latin script; new characters to encode?
I didn't expect this pointless discussion to get that far. Hopefully, this will be the end of it. 2004-07-19T02:39:47+03:00 Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Conclusion: 1) The Republic of Tatarstan passed a law in 1999 and coming into force in 2001 establishing a Tatar Latin alphabet. True. 2) A Russian federal law (a monstrous piece of linguistic imperialism) Peter, your estimates of Russian federal law are inadequate and go beyond the scope of this list. overrode this in 2002, so after the Tatarstan law had come into force. Therefore this Latin alphabet was in some sense officially in force for a period. And it is still considered to be officially in force by many in Tatarstan including top government officials. I can't guess what is considered by many in Tatarstan. And I think you shouldn't be guessing too as it makes no difference in our case. If someone, in spite of the law, consider killing people to be ok, it's a matter of court. 3) As the people of Tatarstan are independent-minded Wow, where did you get this epithet? I agree with that, especially given that 43 percent of Tatarstan's population are Russians. Just a quick question, how is this sentence related to the discussion described in the header? and more likely to follow their local leaders than the linguistic imperialists in Moscow, it is highly likely that at least some of them use the published Latin script even if it is not permitted to have official status. True again. No one is banning you from using, e.g., pig Latin, online or offline. 4) Not all speakers of the Tatar language live in the Russian Federation, and some live in countries like Azerbaijan where the official alphabets use Latin script. In such areas they are clearly likely to use the Latin script. That seems to be the only relevant point of your letter, Peter. Russian Kurds use Cyrillic script, others use Latin or Arabic... Same for the Gipsies, same for Tatars. For this reason (and also for historical reason) Latin alphabet for Tatar language exists. Btw, I remember reading you visited Azerbaijan, so you know the situation there better. I.e., you should know that many Azerbaijan officials write their public speeches in Cyrillic script, so the secretararies need to transliterate them into Latin before publishing. 5) This is an alphabet which has been used, even in official websites, and very likely continues to be used by some. Decisions made in Moscow do not change this, especially because they are in practice widely ignored in Tatarstan Once again, Peter, you're going off the topic. You're invited to prove your assumptions with facts or withdraw them. I personally consider statements of this kind as veiled attacks to Russia's statehood. Please, stop that. and have no force in some other places where Tatars live. This alphabet therefore needs to be supported by Unicode. But fortunately this is not a problem as all the characters are already defined. True, the alphabet is already supported. I've no idea about the point of your latest letter. Alexander -- Alexander Savenkovhttp://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
Re[2]: Writing Tatar using the Latin script; new characters to encode?
Hello, (delayed response) 2004-05-12T19:37:51+03:00 Ernest Cline [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Alexander Savenkov [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2004-05-12T03:08:59+03:00 Eric Muller [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: According to www.eki.ee, there is a currently an effort to convert the writing of Tatar from Cyrillic to Latin. 1. Does somebody have more information about that effort? Perhaps it's their own effort. Eki lists four characters as needed but missing in Unicode (see http://www.eki.ee/letter/chardata.cgi?lang=tt+Tatarscript=latin). 2. The case pair for barred o is encoded (U+019F and U+0275), and it seems that their confusion comes from less-than-perfect but annotated name for U+019F, and from the usage remark African. Can we authoritatively tell them that those two characters are the ones they want? Can we add a Tatar usage remark to both? Is there a need for this? You don't want to tell everyone on the net about his or her wrong assumptions. There's one sentence in the page you mentioned that gives a good description of this resource: The conversion from Cyrillic to Latin script is planned within years 2001-2011. This is false. 3. The case pair n with descender is definitely not encoded, and from my memory of the discussion of ghe with descender, we would want to encode them as separate characters (rather than with combining descenders on n). Is anybody working on that proposal? There's no Latin Tatar script. It's the law. Full stop. It's the Institute of Estonian language. I hope they know more about Estonian than about other languages and Unicode. They are numerous sites on the web about the change from Cyrillic to Latin for Tatar that is planned for completion by 2011 by the Republic of Tatarstan (a part of the Russian Federation). Ernest, I fail to see how the fact that there are numerous sites about Latin for Tatar proves it really exists. There are numerous sites about Babylon 5 and Frankenstein. What are your thoughts about these? There is legal wrangling over wether Tatarstan can make the change back to Latin script official for Tatar as it is used there, but no final decision has been reached and there is probably at least several more years of legal shenanigans before it is reached. You're wrong and the facts you give here are outdated. Legal wrangling is over. See links below (in Russian). ... As for the merits of the proposed change back to Latin, I think it is silly for Tatarstan to make the change and it is silly for the Russian Federation to oppose it. Your clever thoughts are really helpful. I wonder what Russians and Tatars would do without them. Links in Russian: http://www.tatar.ru/?DNSID=0627096ec5c075004c0d219207f349denode_id=978 http://www.tatar.ru/1296_c.html http://www.tatar.ru/index.php?node_id=1006 http://www.tatar.ru/?DNSID=0627096ec5c075004c0d219207f349denode_id=2610 http://www.tatar.ru/?node_id=2611 http://peoples.org.ru/proekt.html http://peoples.org.ru/stenogramma.html Alexander. -- Alexander Savenkovhttp://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
Re[2]: Importance of diacritics
2004-07-14T19:20:35+03:00 Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: For in Russian these dots are considered highly optional, and e with dots (pronounced o or yo - a spelling rule prescribes this instead of o after certain letters when stressed) is not a separate letter of the alphabet (contrast i kratkoe, Cyrillic i with breve, which is a fully separate letter from i). Thats wrong, Peter. The letter is a separate letter. Please dont spread your wrong assumptions in the list. I meant this in the sense that the two letters are interfiled in dictionaries, e.g. At least this is the ordering in my Collins Russian dictionary, and I understand it to be the standard Russian ordering. Am I wrong here? Not at all, though different dictionaries use different approaches. The practice of filing * and * entries under one section is quite common, it however doesnt imply that one of these letters is not aseparate letter. There are two reasons for this kind of ordering: 1. The words with theletter are almost always written with so readers will tend to mix them. 2. The arent many words with initial , so it's safe to file all the * entries along with *. By contrast, and are not interfiled. I cant see why you put these as an example. They are completely different letters (vowel and consonant), notwithstanding their similar look. One of my dictionaries have a section called - which obviously means that the entries cover the letters , , and . Unlike , section the entries are sorted alphabetically. Just like and all of these letters are meant to be separate. Alexander -- Alexander Savenkovhttp://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
Re[2]: Importance of diacritics
Hello, 2004-07-13T13:57:37+03:00 Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In the original Russian, the two dots would appear over the Cyrillic e only in rather specialised circumstances or in texts marked up beginners. Correct. Some people however would like to change that (i.e. so that the dots are no longer optional). For in Russian these dots are considered highly optional, and e with dots (pronounced o or yo - a spelling rule prescribes this instead of o after certain letters when stressed) is not a separate letter of the alphabet (contrast i kratkoe, Cyrillic i with breve, which is a fully separate letter from i). Thats wrong, Peter. The letter is a separate letter. Please dont spread your wrong assumptions in the list. And indeed the dotless e is reflected in the commonest English transcription, Khrushchev (and similarly Gorbachev etc). Regards, Alexander -- Alexander Savenkovhttp://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
Re: Writing Tatar using the Latin script; new characters to encode?
Hello, 2004-05-12T03:08:59+03:00 Eric Muller [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: According to www.eki.ee, there is a currently an effort to convert the writing of Tatar from Cyrillic to Latin. 1. Does somebody have more information about that effort? Perhaps it's their own effort. Eki lists four characters as needed but missing in Unicode (see http://www.eki.ee/letter/chardata.cgi?lang=tt+Tatarscript=latin). 2. The case pair for barred o is encoded (U+019F and U+0275), and it seems that their confusion comes from less-than-perfect but annotated name for U+019F, and from the usage remark African. Can we authoritatively tell them that those two characters are the ones they want? Can we add a Tatar usage remark to both? Is there a need for this? You don't want to tell everyone on the net about his or her wrong assumptions. There's one sentence in the page you mentioned that gives a good description of this resource: The conversion from Cyrillic to Latin script is planned within years 2001-2011. This is false. 3. The case pair n with descender is definitely not encoded, and from my memory of the discussion of ghe with descender, we would want to encode them as separate characters (rather than with combining descenders on n). Is anybody working on that proposal? There's no Latin Tatar script. It's the law. Full stop. It's the Institute of Estonian language. I hope they know more about Estonian than about other languages and Unicode. PS: sorry for the double post to unicode and unicore. However, given the current state of [EMAIL PROTECTED], this seems the best course of action. What's up with [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Alexander Savenkovhttp://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
Re[2]: Fixed Width Spaces (was: Printing and Displaying DependentVowels)
Alexander Savenkov suggested: Why not? I think Peter needs a good book on typesetting to find out what is inserted inserted between Louis and XIV. In this case IIRC there should be the following sequence: Louis,ZWNBSP,SP,ZWNBSP,XIV. Kenneth Whistler replied: Uh, no. ZWNBSP, SPACE, ZWNBSP is equivalent to NBSP. In either case, the SPACE or the NBSP would be (potentially) subject to justification which would change their width. The argument was about how (or whether) to constrain the space between Louis and XIV to a *fixed* width under certain assumptions about justification. To do that, you would need to use a *fixed*-width space as a starting point (and then hope that the justification algorithm used for rendering doesn't ignore or override your choice, anyway). First of all, you dont want a fixed-width space in this particular case, just a non-breaking one (ask the typesetters). A fixed-width space is desirable in cases like: As he was setting the ion gun in place, his fingers had slipped through the portalordinarily no problem, but this morning his hip had also brushed the toggle switch on the control panel at the left of the portal. Youd type portal,ZWNBSP,THIN SP,ZWNBSP,EM DASH,THIN SP,ordinarily. Alexander. -- Alexander Savenkovhttp://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
Re[4]: Fixed Width Spaces (was: Printing and Displaying Depen dentVowels)
Hello, 2004-04-03T02:01:34+03:00 /|/|ike Ayers [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: That is arguable. An aural user agent could pronounce 1, 2, 3 a bit different from 1, 2, 3 if there is a (say) thin space between the digits in the latter case. It could pronounce it quicker, for example. It *could* do that, but, frankly, that would be a bad idea. Speech synthesis devices have enough trouble with plain text as it is - adding special interpretation for neo-markup characters would just make things worse. This belongs in the realm of (surprise!) markup. I wonder why you call them neo-markup characters while they have been used for years, not on the Web of course. Speech synthesizers have to learn how to read (or at least skip) those characters in order to facilitate listening comprehension just like a proof-read book facilitates visual comprehension. This seems to be international let's-merge-markup-into-plaintext month. I'm not one of these. Alexander. -- Alexander Savenkovhttp://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
Re[4]: Fixed Width Spaces (was: Printing and Displaying DependentVowels)
2004-04-03T02:34:38+03:00 D. Starner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It only affects its (visual) aesthetic quality. That is arguable. An aural user agent could pronounce 1, 2, 3 a bit different from 1, 2, 3 if there is a (say) thin space between the digits in the latter case. It could pronounce it quicker, for example. And it could read it as thin space, too. Yeah, and it could read it as all your base are belong to us. And your browser renders it as a hollow square. Hey, and my cat cant read it at all. Whats the point of this? But it's questionable if any speech reader is going to try and interpret such ambiguous and rarely used characters specially. As I already have said in another message, theyre not that ambiguous and rarely used. If someone misuses them, thats his problem. Even if it does, that doesn't make it plain text; italics and q speaker=Holmes can be interpreted by speech readers much more usefully, but are clearly not plain text. You cant markup everything just like you cant make everything plain text. Ive no objections to q speaker=Holmes. Thats just another level. Alexander. -- Alexander Savenkovhttp://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
Re[2]: Fixed Width Spaces (was: Printing and Displaying DependentVowels)
Hello, and sorry for the late response. 2004-04-01T05:41:02+03:00 fantasai [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But, as Ken has just clarified, with NBSP Louis' neck may be stretched rather uncomfortably, if not cut completely. Here is what I don't want to see (fixed width font required): Louis XVI was guillotinedin 1793. This, however, is a matter of presentation rather than semantics, and as such fitly belongs in the realm of presentational markup. In HTML, one might specify ttnbsp;/tt to generate a fixed-width space. I disagree. Surely there is something SEMANTICALLY different about the space in Louis XVI. One semantic difference is that it is non-breaking. But another one is that these words should not be split apart. An additional semantic distinction might be that they should be treated as one word for the purposes of word breaking algorithms. non-breaking and non-stretching are presentational properties, not semantic ones. They don't change the meaning of the space: it's still just a space, not a hyphen or the letter g. They don't affect non-visual media; we don't break lines in spoken speech. Louis XVI is semantically different from Louis' head because the former is a bare noun whereas the latter is a noun phrase, but as far as the reader is concerned, they're both separated with a space. Whether the space breaks or not or stretches or not has no effect on either the meaning or correctness of the text. It only affects its (visual) aesthetic quality. That is arguable. An aural user agent could pronounce 1, 2, 3 a bit different from 1, 2, 3 if there is a (say) thin space between the digits in the latter case. It could pronounce it quicker, for example. Alexander. -- Alexander Savenkovhttp://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
Re[2]: Fixed Width Spaces (was: Printing and Displaying DependentVowels)
Hello, sorry for the late response. 2004-04-01T03:47:40+03:00 Kenneth Whistler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Other possible approaches that any industrial-strength typesetting program ought to provide: ... The point is that looking to encode a special character in Unicode for every distinct visual effect in typesetting is not necessarily the first, best solution to settle on. It might not even be seventh or eighth best on the possible list of alternative approaches to solve the problem. Why not? I think Peter needs a good book on typesetting to find out what is inserted inserted between Louis and XIV. In this case IIRC there should be the following sequence: Louis,ZWNBSP,SP,ZWNBSP,XIV. Alexander. -- Alexander Savenkovhttp://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
Re: Tajik alphabet code
Hello Aso, 2004-03-01T11:18:34+03:00 Asomiddin Atoev [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am emailing on behalf of the Tajikistani state working group on localizing software for Tajik language. Could you please kindly guide us to be in right direction. What shall be the procedure of standartization of alphabet symbols? Tajik alphabet makes use of cyrillic symbols and contains of 35 letters. As far as I know all of the Cyrillic letters contained in the Tajik alphabet are already encoded in the Unicode standard. See the code charts at: http://www.unicode.org/charts/ and particularly http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0400.pdf. I heard the Tajik alphabet was reformed, if you could send a picture or a link to the modern alphabet then someone (e.g., me) could provide the exact codepoints for you if you're in doubt. Best regards, Alexander. -- Alexander Savenkovhttp://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
Re: Stability of scientific names, was Stability of WG2
Hello, 2003-12-17T11:06:32Z Curtis Clark [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: on 2003-12-16 15:27 Peter Kirk wrote: I'm no expert on this... I am. :-) but I thought that species could be transferred from genus to genus as knowledge advances. As John pointed out, the epithet stays the same. And presumably obvious spelling mistakes are corrected (contrast FHTORA in U+1D0C5), or are you saying that if the first publication had Brontosuarus as a typo this error would remain for ever? There are errors and then there are errors. Some are correctable, some are not, and botanists and zoologists have different rules about this. An example that's not entirely OT: There was a Russian physician with the last name - a cyrillicization of his German family name He was actually. You forgot the soft sign. (I'm not sure everyone will see the name - the editor replaced the encoding with windows-1251, and there's no UTF-8 support). Regards, -- Alexander Savenkovhttp://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
Re[2]: [OT] CJK - CJC (Re: Corea?)
Hello, 2003-12-17T14:36:37Z Philippe Verdy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Marco Cimarosti wrote: Doug Ewell wrote: I'll go farther than that. It's always bothered me that speakers of European languages, including English but especially French, have seen fit to rename the cities and internal subdivisions of other countries. Rightly said! There is reason to rename Colonia to Koln, Augusta to Augsburg, Eboraco to York, Provincia to Provence, and so on. Or even Aix-la-Chapelle to Aachen because that's its _current_ German name (the French name was official in the history, and is still used in French). Cities sometimes change name, some of theme being famous like the _current_ Saint-Petersbourg (French name revived in Russia with just a It's Saint-Petersburg (or St. Petersburg) if you write in English. The name has German roots, not French ones. transliteration, the Latin transcription being also widely used by Russians) Why would Russians use the Latin transcription for a Russian name? which has also been Leningrad or Petrograd or Stalingrad Stalingrad was the previous name for Volgograd, not St. Petersburg. The initial name was Tsaritsyn. Petrograd on the other hand *was* the name of St. Petersburg in 1914-1924. Leningrad was the name of it in 1924-1991. (in the Latin transliteration of the official and changing Russian script name, this Latin transliteration changing a bit among various languages which used them), and even Saint-Petersbourg officially for some time in the tsar's Russia. I wonder what you meant by the some time part. St. Petersburg was founded in 1703, and therefore stayed St. Petersburg for more than 200 years, that is it was St. Petersburg *most* of the time. You mixed everything up, Phillippe. Regards, -- Alexander Savenkovhttp://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
[OT] Re[2]: Swastika to be banned by Microsoft?
Hello Philippe, 2003-12-14T16:56:10Z Philippe Verdy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Snip... I find nothnig wrong in proposing a font which does not have these symbols for use in European scripts, where the occurence of the symbol is almost always associated to the Nazi's party, but I think it would be wrong to remove them from fonts designed for Asian markets that need it to represent their script, in a context where such association is not self-evident. AFAIK the use of the symbol is forbidden in the names/logos of organizations in Russia. It, unsurprisingly, was present here before, e.g., it was printed on the Russian money in 1917 or so. ...snip... However there's still a problem with the ancient scandinavian usage: I guess it is more appropriate to speak about the ancient Babylonian or rather ancient Russian (Boreal) use. See, for instance, [1]. it's not clear that the symbol would only fit in Asian fonts. However the symbols could be present in fonts made to represent old European scripts such as Runic, even if they have been used in translations to Roman-Latin or Church-Latin of these texts, with a Latin or Gothic script, or even in some other Uralic languages. References: [1] ISBN 5-85141-016-7, p. 38. Regards, Alexander. -- Alexander Savenkovhttp://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
Re: [OT] Re[2]: Swastika to be banned by Microsoft?
Michael, 2003-12-14T18:48:17Z Michael Everson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: References: [1] ISBN 5-85141-016-7, p. 38. What is this and how does one find it? Amazon.ru? :-) A book on history, as a matter of fact. Try visiting ozon.ru if you can read Russian. I personally got if from the author at the exhibition here in Moscow recently. I though I should post the reference to the exact source instead of sending the unfounded assertions, nothing more than that. Alexander. -- Alexander Savenkovhttp://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
Re[2]: Berber/Tifinagh (was: Swahili Banthu)
Hello, 2003-11-09T21:41:25Z Michael Everson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At 19:30 +0100 2003-11-09, Philippe Verdy wrote: So my question is, once again: would a font that would display pointed Latin glyphs from Tifinagh script code points really break the Unicode model? Yes, Philippe. It is the same thing as mapping Cyrillic to ASCII letters. It is a hack. It is to be avoided. It is the Wrong Thing To Do. I'm not sure I'm not taking your words out of the context, Michael. The Wrong Thing To Do can be seen everywhere in the newspapers when the names and some other words originally written in Cyrillic and other scripts are letter-by-letter (mapped?) transliterated to the resulting script. I can guess you're aware of the Russian GOST (state standard) accepted IIRC by the ISO which maps the Russian letters to the Latin letters or their combinations for different scripts. It allows people to recognize the original name and to trace the original orthography back. It also lets the people without the knowledge of Cyrillic letters to read and write the Cyrillic names. Therefore such mapping isn't a hack but a Right Thing To Do. Best regards, -- Alexander Savenkovhttp://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
Re[2]: GDP by language
Hello everyone, 2003-10-22T21:53:44Z Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ...snip... The data doesn't support addition to this degree of accuracy because of the effect of the others area. Cyrillic may even overtake Arabic, because there are several countries using the Cyrillic alphabet, but not Russian or Ukrainian, which might each contribute 0.1-0.2%, but no countries as far as I know using Arabic script but not Arabic, Persian or Urdu as official languages (except perhaps Pashto in Afghanistan). I know that Tajik is currently written and taught in Arabic script in some schools. That's another one. There may be more. Best regards, -- Alexander Savenkovhttp://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
