On 28/09/2004 17:09, Eric Muller wrote:
I was looking a few days ago at other missing Cyrillic characters, forMichael Everson wrote:
At 08:12 -0700 2004-09-28, Eric Muller wrote:
It seems that Abkhaz, written in Cyrillic, uses a PE WITH DESCENDER, but I can't find this case pair in Unicode. I am missing something, or do we need to encode those?
U+04A6, U+04A7 are used in Abkhaz for that sound, I believe.
Isn't it problematic to have the distinction between (MIDDLE) HOOK and DESCENDER for GHE (494/4F6), KA (4C3/49A) and arguably EN (4C7/4C9) but not for PE?
That being said, I am not trying to beat the master of disunification 8-) If we agree that 4A6/7 is it, then we need at least an annotation "can be rendered with a descender instead of a hook", or may be go all the way for a change of the representative glyph to use a descender, since that is the form used in both D&B and in the Abkhaz font.
Thanks, Eric.
Chukchi, Itelmen, Nivkh etc, e.g. those listed towards the end of
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=DoulosSIL_Technical.
It seems from this, and from my own experience with Azerbaijani and other languages of that region, that although there are various descenders and additions added to Cyrillic letters for various alphabets, the distinctions between them are glyph variations rather than character differences. I think that there are rarely two different additions to the same base character in any one language, and probably never two different descenders. The actual form of the addition can be very variable. For example in Azerbaijani Cyrillic 04B8/04B9 are usually handwritten as if they were 04B6/04B7, and 049C/049D are handwritten as 049A/049B and sometimes printed like K with a cross across its bottom right branch. The apparent differences, certainly between WITH DESCENDER, WITH HOOK and WITH TAIL, seem to result from local or regional typographical preferences rather than real character distinctions.
I don't of course want to unify any characters which are already encoded distinctly, although I might have argued for more unification if I had been involved earlier. But I would want to caution against adding further characters which may simply be regionally preferred glyph variants.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
