Proposal to add 2 Romanian characters

From: Cristian Secarã (orice@secarica.ro)
Date: Sun Apr 25 2004 - 19:19:16 EDT

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    I like to make a proposal for 2 Romanian characters to be added to the
    Unicode / ISO 10646-1 (Basic Multilingual Plane) character set.
    The new characters should be
    - Latin small letter i with circumflex and acute accent
    - Latin capital letter I with circumflex and acute accent

    Details: the Romanian language has 6 (3x2) complex accented characters,
    used in rare occasions; these characters are:
    - Latin small letter a with breve and acute accent (Unicode 1EA5)
    - Latin capital letter A with breve and acute accent (Unicode 1EA4)
    - Latin small letter a with circumflex and acute accent (Unicode 1EAF)
    - Latin capital letter A with circumflex and acute accent (Unicode
    1EAE)
    - Latin small letter i with circumflex and acute accent (no Unicode)
    - Latin capital letter I with circumflex and acute accent (no Unicode)

    For the first 4 characters, see this example
    http://www.secarica.ro/unicode_1ea5_1eaf.jpg (.jpg, 124 K)
    For the last 2 characters, see this example
    http://www.secarica.ro/unicode_none.jpg (.jpg, 100K)

    From a practical point of view, these characters can be rather
    considered as U+0103 with acute accent, U+0102 with acute accent,
    U+00E2 with acute accent, U+00C2 with acute accent, U+00EE with acute
    accent and U+00CE with acute accent.
    However, from a machine point of view, this is an unfortunate approach.

    These characters are usually needed by some academic literature (like
    dictionaries). The acute accent is normally never needed in daily
    written Romanian language. The acute accent is an explicit information
    about pronunciation, only required in texts where contextual confusion
    may occur, or where pronunciation rules are explicitly described.

    I recently identified this problem, because in our new keyboard
    national standard the characters 1EA4, 1EA5, 1EAE and 1EAF were
    included in an "informative" annex. At the same time it was impossible
    to include a reference to characters [Latin small letter i with
    circumflex and acute accent] and [Latin capital I with circumflex and
    acute accent] because of the lack of an appropriate Unicode code point.

    For reference, the above examples are from this book
    http://www.secarica.ro/ghilimele_ioop.png (.png, 47K)

    Thank you.
    Best wishes,
        Cristi



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