This is a forwarded message -- some marginally intersting notes about real-world implemantation of combining diacriticals and about karelian orthographies.
From: Marco Pribilla <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sunday, December 22, 2002, 9:00:22 PM Subject: Karelian ASSR ===8<==============Original message text=============== Hello António, > > One small problem are Karelian Cyrillic characters > that don't exist in > > the Russian alphabet, i.e. in the word > > Венäян "Venäjän" > there should be an > > umlaut not only on the a but also on the я. > > That is not a problem. Even if this particular > letter seem to have been > left out in Unicode it can be rendered as base > letter plus diacritical > (actually it *should* -- as all diacritical > letters): я̈. > > 776 is U+308, a character that modifies the > preceeding letter adding an > umlaut sign above it. Sorry, I don't get that diacritical :-( I have the usual Cyrillic and Central European language supports on my Windows system, but is some special support needed to show that sign? Or is it simply the two dots (¨)? > The same, BTW for karelian "ä": it is not really the > same letter than in > german, even if it looks the same: You can chose > either ӓ or the > combination ӓ, i.e., the normal cyrillic > "a" modified by an > umlaut sign. I don't get those characters either, but I got the idea... > (BTW, if you even come across some material about > these successive > orthographic reforms, I'd like to know about it.) Please check chapter 8.2 in Mr. Anttikoski's dissertation at <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4280/lisuri8.html#8.2>. Even if you don't understand any Finnish, you can see at this location two proposals for a Cyrillic Karelian character set, both scientifically developed. The essential difference to the Russian alphabet were the a, o, y, я and ю with umlaut (or short line in the second proposal). According to Anttikoski, the definite alphabet was adopted by order of the People's Commissioner for Education (?) of the RSFSR, at the very end of the year 1937 (no precise date known) without any scientific discussion. It should be as close to the Russian alphabet as possible. ä, ö and ÿ were taken into the new alphabet along all the Russian letters but the "umlauted" я and ю were excluded because they "would have caused confusion". (Perhaps these letters could be included in the list of Cyrillic character at <ru_cyr.html>?) I'm not sure how long this alphabet was used, but as you know the situation changed once more with the creation of the Karelian-Finnish SSR that abandoned Karelian as an official language. Nowadays Karelian is written with a Finnish-based system (adding to it "c" and "z" plus the same with hacheks) but the situation will probably have to change again due to the new language law of the Russian Federation that makes Cyrillics compulsory for all the languages within the Federation. I have been corresponding with Mr. Anttikoski in order to obtain some more background information about the inscriptions. I'll keep you informed if I learn something new. Regards, Marco ===8<===========End of original message text=========== -- ____. António MARTINS-Tuválkin, | ()| <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> |####| R. Laureano de Oliveira, 64 r/c esq. | PT-1885-050 MOSCAVIDE (LRS) Não me invejo de quem tem | +351 917 511 549 carros, parelhas e montes | http://www.tuvalkin.web.pt/bandeira/ só me invejo de quem bebe | http://pagina.de/bandeiras/ a água em todas as fontes |
