From: Don Osborn (dzo@bisharat.net)
Date: Sat Dec 06 2003 - 00:52:28 EST
Michael, Thanks for the follow up. Replies re characters except for glottal
stop in text below...
Michael Everson wrote:
> At 10:36 +0100 2003-12-05, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> >Some letters used in Latin transcription of Pan-Sahelian scripts are
still
> >missing in Unicode:
> >Is there a proposal to include them, as they are needed for case folding
and
> >capital transcrtiption?
> >
> >I can identify immediately these two ones that would be needed on
> >Pan-Sahelian keyboards:
> >
> >U+027E LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH FISHHOOK
> >U+???? LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R WITH FISHHOOK
> >
> >U+0266 LATIN SMALL LETTER H WITH HOOK
> >U+???? LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H WITH HOOK
>
> Looking at the International Niamey keyboard layout given at
>
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=IntlNiameyKybd
NB- This is not definitive, of course. See
http://www.bisharat.net/A12N/charsum.html for summary of character data
mainly from Hartell (1993) or better yet Lee Pearce's more detailed
inventory at http://www.bisharat.net/A12N/AfricanSymbolsInventory2.doc .
These are not definitive either but more up to date.
> it can be observed that, of the set of letters used, four of them do
> not have capital forms:
>
> U+0251 LATIN SMALL LETTER ALPHA
> U+0266 LATIN SMALL LETTER H WITH HOOK
> U+0273 LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH RETROFLEX HOOK
Not sure why this was added to the keyboard when it was not in either the
original Niamey "African Reference Alphabet" (for which you give the URL
below) or in the revised one (in Mann and Dalby 1982, for which you give the
URL to Peter Constable's presentation of it above). There is another N form
character in the '82 revised ARA - perhaps it and the retroflex n are
intended to be equivalent? (I don't have access to the book.) I have no
info where either are used.
> U+027E LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH FISHHOOK
>
[ . . . ]
>
> What shall we do? Research seems required. ;-)
>
> Referring to http://www.bisharat.net/Documents/Niamey78annex.htm we find
This of course is the original ARA from Niamey '78. It varies in some
details from the old ISO-6438 which was as I understand it the basis for
"African characters" included in Unicode / ISO-10646.
> LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA
Would apparently be necessary at least for a major dialect of Bamileke in
Cameroon. Somewhere I think I've seen the alpha used for Tamasheq
transcriptions.
> LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R WITH STROKE
Can this be dynamically composed like the lower case?
> LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z WITH UPPER HOOK (not the Germanic one)
> LATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH UPPER HOOK (not the Germanic one)
>
> And we find a T-with-stroke that corresponds to U+01AE LATIN CAPITAL
> LETTER T WITH HOOK and should be considered a glyph variant. Note the
> glyph variant of U+01A9 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ESH.
Peter did a page on the z's and t's (and some others) at
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=AfrGlyphVars
I've been meaning to find out more re the hooked z's and will talk with
someone here in Niamey next week who might have some info.
The topic of the capital esh as large version of the small letter was
brought up by Eric Rasmussen in
http://lists.kabissa.org/lists/archives/public/a12n-collaboration/msg00342.html
(it may have come up elsewhere too). I'm not sure what Eris's other sources
were for this form of capital esh.
All of what came out of the process of which the Niamey conference was a
part is of interest - and indeed one wishes had been linked more closely to
the ISO process - but preference I think you all would agree would go to
what is actually used in the field. Some of what was inspired by Niamey got
off on what seems now to be a tangent; some may have been prescriptive and
apparently never really adopted. (As such, and especially with regard to
the latter, this may serve as a caveat for some of what's happening in
Morocco with Tifinagh and the work on encoding it.)
Don Osborn
Bisharat.net
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