People are facing the recurrent idea that the Greek theta used to write the Rromani language in International Standard orthography—as well as a number of other languages—will be or ought to be encoded as a separate casing pair in Unicode.
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THETA and LATIN SMALL LETTER THETA were part of Michael Eversonʼs 2012 proposal at http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2012/12138-n4262-unifon.pdf as the intended code points U+A7B0 and U+A7B1. While some characters were retained, others were rejected, among which the Latin Theta pair, but no mention is found of this rejection in the Non-Approval Notices. Two years later this proposal was sustained by Denis Moyogo Jacqueryeʼs additional proposal at http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14202-latin-theta-delta.pdf with a new rationale, as being required in writing systems of several natural languages. On the sole criterium of glyphic resemblance there exist already two matching characters in Unicode: 03F4 GREEK CAPITAL THETA SYMBOL 03B8 GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA Does the UTC consider it as feasible to meet the issue by implementing a tailored casing pair for the related locales, and adding somewhere an annotation for the information of font designers, or can people expect to see one day a successful proposal for LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THETA and LATIN SMALL LETTER THETA? Yet to date, this is not found in the Pipeline. (Though experience showed that a given character being rejected in one proposal is without prejudice to its being accepted as a part of a later proposal. That happened to the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SMALL CAPITAL I, found already in Mr Eversonʼs 2012 proposal and now added to Unicode in 2016.) The Greek Theta as an IPA character was incidentally discussed already in the following thread: Unicode Mail List Archive: gamma as a phonetic symbol. (Sat Sep 27 2008 - 11:43:57 CDT). Retrieved June 10, 2016, from http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2008-m09/0072.html According to Mr Everson in this thread, «Theta is perhaps the hardest to argue for» disunification: http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2008-m09/0076.html Why so, is however non-obvious to me because the capital does not match the glyphic expectations for the Romani International Standard Latin script subset as referred to in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_alphabets#International_Standard and more detailedly in https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%AAta_latin (available yet in French only, but anyway one might wish to check the picture). Consequently AFAIK to date the Greek Capital Theta Symbol is preferred as uppercase, not the Greek Capital Theta. Using the Symbol variant brings some odds in data processing due to the lack of round-trip casing relationship. This adds to the overall problem of cross-script usage. Using several scripts to write one language contradicts one of the design principles of Unicode. I note too, that in its International Standard Alphabet form, Romany is not supported by the blocks up to Latin Extended-A, unlike TUS 8.0 states on page 296. This brings up the need to underscore that Unicode added the H with háček (U+021E U+021F) for Finnish Romany in the Latin Extended-B block. However U+03F4 ( ϴ ) GREEK CAPITAL THETA SYMBOL was among the subset of potentially obsolete characters found in the Archives of this List in the following e-mail: http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2009-m01/0558.html Solving this issue now is important in that the French Standard Keyboard Layout will support Rromani Standard Latin script (along with all European Latin script using languages). This topic being about plain character encoding, Iʼve finally decided to submit it to your kind advice. Marcel