On 27/07/2004 18:21, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
What's all the fuss, then?
Ivan the Terrible conquered (what is now) Tatarstan in 1552. Stalin imposed the Cyrillic alphabet in 1939. Do the current Russian authorities want the same reputation? That's why this is a big issue in Tatarstan.
BarlÄq keÅelÃr dà azat hÃm Ãz abruylarÄ hÃm xoquqlarÄ yaÄÄnnan tià bulÄp tualar. AlarÄa aqÄl hÃm woclaà birelgÃn hÃm ber-bersenà qarata tuÄanarÃa monÃsÃbÃttà bulÄrÄa tieÅlÃr - for a translation, see http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tatar.htm (but there do seem to be some variations in the alphabet).
Unicode exists to support what people use. Do people use Latin script for Tatar? Evidence indicates that they do. Should Unicode support it, then? Certainly. Does Unicode support it? Yes, Unicode supports the Latin script, with gobs of extensions. So what's the problem? Are there any characters in Latin transcription of Tatar that Unicode doesn't support?
Well, there is a strange curly Y for [y] in the 1929-1939 alphabet, which looks like 01B3/01B4 but I wonder if that is really the historic form as these letters are in Unicode for African languages. Apart from that, there are in fact no problems.
The law doesn't enter into this. What's the big deal?
~mark
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
