From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Thu Apr 29 2004 - 15:23:56 EDT
> In the Bureau of American Ethnology reports, early Americanist characters are
> used, and they are used with casing, including the C with stroke. For example,
> in the attached file, from page 357 of the 3rd annual report of the BAE (1884),
> from the Article "Omaha Sociology" by Rev. J. Owen Dorsey (later reprinted as
> as Omaha Sociology in 1970), you can clearly see the use of the small letter
> c with slash (circled in blue) and the large letter c with slash (circled in
> red). Hence, for proper casing, the cent sign and c with slash can't be unified.
What nobody seems to have noticed yet is that in that same document,
Rev. J. Owen Dorsey also used an uppercase turned T (the capital
letter form of U+0287 LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED T, which also appears
in this text). Those turned t's were used in Dorsey's orthography of
Omaha and Ponca texts. This usage of
turned t is pretty idiosyncratic to Dorsey, but did get into some
prestigious BAE publications from the late 19th century. It isn't
really Americanist usage per se -- Franz Boas and his students established
those conventions a little later, and they didn't include the use of
turned letters.
At any rate, since *neither* the capital C-stroke nor the capital turned-T
are in Unicode currently, anyone who is thinking about putting together
a proposal for the first one based on this Dorsey material might
as well include the other character as well, so we don't have to
"rediscover" it 6 years from now.
--Ken
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