Jim Allan responded to Joe Becker: > Joe posted: > > > c. CEDILLAS AND HOOKS: > > > > Two cedillas and two hooks are required as diacritical marks > > for bibliographic > > transcription, and also for the proper representation of a > > number of languages > > (as documented in ANSI Z39.47-1985 and ISO 5426-1983).
... > According to http://www.niso.org/international/SC4/Wg1_240.pdf: > > 5/1 RUDE > ISO/TC46/SC4/WG1 N 240 > The character rude ( right cedilla in MARC 21) is specious. Its only > use (according to ANSEL and ISO 5426 although one may > draw on the other) is in the romanization of Thai (specifically, > according to the ALA-LC Romanization Tables). ... > U+0322 COMBINING RETROFLEX HOOK is not mentioned at all in commentary or > in the Unicode identifications. I concur with Jim Allan's position here. The ANSEL rude was a misinterpretation (which, by the way, was *not* encoded in Unicode). And the ANSEL right hook was identified with the ogonek. > > So I continue to doubt that "combining retroflex hook" existed as an > independant character before Unicode. The only information of usage for > this character in the Unicode standard is "IPA: retroflexion". In fact > this is not an IPA diacritic and never has been. The proximate source was Pullum and Ladusaw's Phonetic Symbol Guide, 1986. See p. 228 of the 1986 edition. The same information about "Right Hook" occurs on p. 264 of the 1996 edition. See the long discussion there regarding the provenience of this symbol (and its disuse by the IPA in favor of preformed characters with various hooks). It is also connected to the rhotic hook, of course, separately encoded as U+02DE in Unicode. Of course, the annotation "IPA: retroflexion" is pretty terse in the Unicode Standard, but it is only there to help identify the mark in question. It would be unreasonable to expect to repeat the entire page of commentary that Pullum and Ladusaw provide. So this was not created by Unicode, although it likely did not exist as an *encoded* character in any prior character encoding standard -- which can also be said of hundreds (or thousands) of other characters encoded for the first time in the Unicode Standard. [Another entry for "Every Character Has a Story." ? ] > > It may be that the IPA retroflex hook modification of > dental/alveolar/postalveolar characters was included in Unicode because > it was incorrectly identified with a right hook in some other standard > and remained when the other hook was withdrawn from consideration. Nope. --Ken > > > Jim Allan > >
