From: Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin (antonio@tuvalkin.web.pt)
Date: Thu Dec 26 2002 - 20:43:48 EST
This is a forwarded message -- some marginally intersting notes about
real-world implemantation of combining diacriticals and about karelian
orthographies.
From: Marco Pribilla <stellalibertatis@yahoo.de>
To: Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin <antonio@tuvalkin.web.pt>
Date: Sunday, December 22, 2002, 9:00:22 PM
Subject: Karelian ASSR
===8<==============Original message text===============
Hello António,
> > One small problem are Karelian Cyrillic characters
> that don't exist in
> > the Russian alphabet, i.e. in the word
> > Венäян "Venäjän"
> there should be an
> > umlaut not only on the a but also on the я.
>
> That is not a problem. Even if this particular
> letter seem to have been
> left out in Unicode it can be rendered as base
> letter plus diacritical
> (actually it *should* -- as all diacritical
> letters): я̈.
>
> 776 is U+308, a character that modifies the
> preceeding letter adding an
> umlaut sign above it.
Sorry, I don't get that diacritical :-( I have the
usual Cyrillic and Central European language supports
on my Windows system, but is some special support
needed to show that sign? Or is it simply the two dots
(¨)?
> The same, BTW for karelian "ä": it is not really the
> same letter than in
> german, even if it looks the same: You can chose
> either ӓ or the
> combination ӓ, i.e., the normal cyrillic
> "a" modified by an
> umlaut sign.
I don't get those characters either, but I got the
idea...
> (BTW, if you even come across some material about
> these successive
> orthographic reforms, I'd like to know about it.)
Please check chapter 8.2 in Mr. Anttikoski's
dissertation at
<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4280/lisuri8.html#8.2>.
Even if you don't understand any Finnish, you can see
at this location two proposals for a Cyrillic Karelian
character set, both scientifically developed. The
essential difference to the Russian alphabet were the
a, o, y, я and ю with umlaut (or short
line in the second proposal).
According to Anttikoski, the definite alphabet was
adopted by order of the People's Commissioner for
Education (?) of the RSFSR, at the very end of the
year 1937 (no precise date known) without any
scientific discussion. It should be as close to the
Russian alphabet as possible. ä, ö and ÿ were taken
into the new alphabet along all the Russian letters
but the "umlauted" я and ю were excluded
because they "would have caused confusion". (Perhaps
these letters could be included in the list of
Cyrillic character at <ru_cyr.html>?)
I'm not sure how long this alphabet was used, but as
you know the situation changed once more with the
creation of the Karelian-Finnish SSR that abandoned
Karelian as an official language. Nowadays Karelian is
written with a Finnish-based system (adding to it "c"
and "z" plus the same with hacheks) but the situation
will probably have to change again due to the new
language law of the Russian Federation that makes
Cyrillics compulsory for all the languages within the
Federation.
I have been corresponding with Mr. Anttikoski in order
to obtain some more background information about the
inscriptions. I'll keep you informed if I learn
something new.
Regards,
Marco
===8<===========End of original message text===========
-- ____.
António MARTINS-Tuválkin, | ()|
<antonio@tuvalkin.web.pt> |####|
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