From: Benjamin M Scarborough (benjamin.scarborough@student.utdallas.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 29 2008 - 12:19:59 CDT
It seems odd to me that the Latin letters for tones three and four in
the 1957 Zhuang orthography are still unified with CYRILLIC LETTER ZE
and CYRILLIC LETTER CHE. I believe there is enough evidence for
disunification.
1. In Unicode 5.1, CYRILLIC LETTER QA and CYRILLIC LETTER WE were
disunified from LATIN LETTER Q and LATIN LETTER W, so there's a recent
precedent.
2. The five 1957 Zhuang tone letters were meant as modified versions of
the digits 2 through 6, but ZE and CHE were derived from other sources
alongside the rest of the Cyrillic alphabet.
3. With the exception of Zhuang, ZE and CHE represent [z] and [tʃ] (or
some near variant of those). In Zhuang, they're used for tones ([˥] and
[˦˨] respectively), indicating that ZE and CHE were not chosen for
their existing use, but for their resemblance to 3 and 4.
Based on this, I believe a case can be made to disunify LATIN LETTER
TONE THREE and LATIN LETTER TONE FOUR from CYRILLIC LETTER ZE and
CYRILLIC LETTER CHE.
--Ben Scarborough
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