Re: Canadian Unified Syllabics

From: chris@languagegeek.com
Date: Thu Feb 12 2004 - 13:57:43 EST

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    Hi.

    >Make your recommendation either for encoding 3 separate things, or for
    >use of variation selectors; or put the issue out for the committee to
    >decide.

    I would recommend that three "invisible" (I don't know the technical term)
    characters be adden, base-line final, mid-line final, and top-line final. I
    can't see why the "top-line final" would be necessary except see *** below.
    The benifit of this concept is that for fonts which do not have these
    opentype substitutions, there would be no visual effect on the screen, just
    that all finals would be top-line, instead of their proper place.

    >> Carrier is missing 2 characters (only one of which appears in the
    >> text) and Blackfoot is missing 1 character (which doesn't appear in the
    >> text).

    >Those are the only 3 you found, apart from the different height finals
    >for Dene languages, is that right? Or are there still others?

    Those are the only missing characters that were used in examples on my
    website. Other missing characters are:

    -the Ojibway i-finals (vital),
    -Ojibway combining r and l finals (I believe necessary, I have a contact
    who could verify if the communities are still using these),
    -historical Chipewyan l and g finals (obsolete really),
    -woods cree dh-final (vital),
    -ojibway-cree small ring final (vital),
    -west cree w-vowel-y final (if this in not what U+141d is supposed to be, a
    colon-like character would be the usual form of this),
    -west cree y-dot final (forgot to put an example of this on the webpage,
    will fix) (vital),
    -a syllabics hyphen? (just an idea),
    -I have found evidence that Beaver used a superscript roman l in native
    words (I will put an example up). I figure the other superscript roman
    characters (used only in borrowings) could be coded something like "F" +
    "topline final". ***

    along with the blackfoot and carrier
    -blackfoot w-equals sign (vital)
    -carrier sans-serif s final (vital)
    -carrier f/v final (loan words only, but would be useful)
    (I also will try and get in contact with an expert in Carrier).

    thanks... chris

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