see no reason given for us not to unify the handwritten symbol we have seen with BREVE ABOVE. In the environment described, apparently bg is taken as an abbreviation for berg, and b˜g (with breve) is being used as an abbreviation for burg. The breve is the same as was used in German to differentiate u from n.
The thing in those examples shown as a curly thing between the b and the g should be encoded as a brever over the b.
That's my opinion, anyway.
The map sample may have been hand lettered, however, there's no evidence that suggests that the usage is limited to handwriting. On the contrary, we have heard from at least one contributor that the symbol exists in a font used by a Landesvermessungsamt, which is a German geographical service on the state level, and in the context definitely a proper authority on usage.
Functionally, the symbol is not a breve. Visually, the sample does not look like a standard breve, and the font resource cited matches the style of the sample according to the contributor who cited it, implying that there well may be a particular conventional shape to this symbol. Finally, the mark is not placed above the 'b'. To me these facts imply that on all three counts a unification with the ordinary combining breve is definitely inappropriate.
There are two items that are possibly subject to question.
One is the putative derivation of the symbol from a superscript 'u'. I think it's quite possible that that is correct, even though the possibility that it's based on the distinguishing mark used to discriminate between 'u' and 'n' seems possible and believable. I'm ready to concede that Otto might know more about this than Michael or myself, but I would be most satisfied if we could get either a citation or input from another expert. I'm sure we're not the first set of people interested in the derivation of this.
The other is the question of whether a unification with the double breve (i.e. a breve that spans two characters) can and should be considered. The existing double breve would be placed between the b and g as required. However, there are three issues that would need to be resolved: Whether there's a strong functional identity to the double breve that would make unification unattractive, whether the conventional glyph shape cited from map sample and font resource is an essential enough aspect of the character to make unification unattractive, and finally, whether the fact that the double breve is intended to fully extend over both characters, rather than being a shorter mark inteded to sit between wouldn't make unification unattractive.
Rather than exchanging more opinions on this matter, it would bring us forward if the people who discovered the mark could collect all the evidence together with any useful arguments that surfaced in the e-mail discussion and put it into a formal character proposal. That would allow UTC and WG2 to settle the open issues I mentioned based on the best available evidence - which is how we proceed with all proposed characters.
A./
