Katakana Extended-A?

From: Benjamin M Scarborough (benjamin.scarborough@student.utdallas.edu)
Date: Mon Dec 03 2007 - 02:32:47 CST

  • Next message: Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven: "Re: Katakana Extended-A?"

    I've come across a number of characters used for kana that are not
    currently supported by Unicode and may need to be added.

    http://jdlib.ntl.gov.tw/cgi-bin/browse.cgi?bookid=bjn00172v01

    This is a Taiwanese-Japanese dictionary published during the Japanese
    occupation of Taiwan, placed online by the National Taichung Library.
    Briefly looking through the dictionary shows katakana with a number of
    extensions used for pronunciation of Taiwanese words. I randomly
    selected page 874 towards the bottom and found it to be a very good
    example.

    First are the tone marks. Out of the thirteen tone marks used in the
    dictionary, ten are clearly visible on this page. The syllables consist
    of two or three katakana characters with a tone mark centered over the
    syllable. Unmarked syllables are tone 1.

    Also visible on this particular page, on the top section, fourth column
    from the left, is a yet-unencoded KATAKANA LETTER SMALL WO. Compare to
    the fullsized WO directly to the left.

    Lastly, there are two combining marks visible on individual characters:
    a combining line above and a combining dot below. These could be
    unified with U+0305 COMBINING OVERLINE and U+0323 COMBINING DOT BELOW
    respectively.

    http://www.geocities.jp/itikun01/hibi/zat2.html

    At the above site is evidence of KATANAKA LETTER YI, KATAKANA LETTER
    YE, KATAKANA LETTER WU, HIRAGANA LETTER YI, and HIRAGANA LETTER YE.
    They apparently were introduced in the Meiji era but never entered
    common usage. However, I have not been able to find instances of any of
    these five characters in use.

    If any of these characters are indeed potential additions to Unicode, I
    propose making a new Katakana Extended-A block at U+AAE0..U+AAFF.



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