Re: [Unicode] Re: HENTAIGANA LETTER E-1

Hi,

I'm not a representative of the experts working for the
proposal from Japan NB, but I could explain something.

1) "They never took that out?" I'm not sure who you mean
"they" (UTC? JNB?), but it seems that no official document
asking for the response from JNB is submitted in WG2.
If UTC sends something officially, JNB would response
something, I believe.

2) Difference in HENTAIGANA LETTER E-1 and U+1B001.

U+1B001 is a character designed to note an ancient (and
extinct in modern Japanese language) pronunciation YE.

When standard kana was defined about 100 years ago,
the pronunciation YE was already merged to E.
Some scholars planned to use a few kana-like characters
to note such pronunciation (to discuss about the ancient
Japanese language pronunciation), and used some hentaigana-
like glyphs for such purpose. As far as I know, there is
no wide consensus that the glyph looking like U+1B001 was
historically used to note YE mainly, when YE and E were
distinctively used in Japanese language.

On the other hand, JNB's proposal does not include any
ancient/extinct pronunciation, Their phonetic coverage
is exactly same with modern Japanese language. So,
the glyph looking like U+1B001 is not designed to note
the pronunciation YE. The motivation why JNB proposed
hentaigana would be just because of their shape differences.

Therefore, U+1B001 and HENTAIGANA E-1 could be said as
differently designed, their designed usages are different.
Please do not think JNB hentaigana experts overlooked
U+1B001 and proposed a duplicated encoding. They ought to
have known it but proposed.

However, some WG2 experts suggested to unify them because
of the shape similarity. I'm not sure whether 2 glyphs are
indistinctively similar for hentaigana scholars, but I
accept with that some people are hard to distinguish.
I cannot distinguish some Latin and Greek alphabets when
they are displayed as single isolated character.

Regards,
mpsuzuki

Garth Wallace wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 8:22 AM, Michael Everson <everson_at_evertype.com> wrote:
>> On 6 Jan 2016, at 14:42, David Corbett <corbett.dav_at_husky.neu.edu> wrote:
>>> Is there a difference between HENTAIGANA LETTER E-1 in L2/15-343 and
>>> U+1B001 HIRAGANA LETTER ARCHAIC YE?
>> No, there is not. The former would be unified with it.
>>
>> Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
>>
>
> They never took that out? I pointed it out back in July and Ken Lunde
> passed it along in his official feedback AIUI:
> <http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15277-pubrev.html>. I could have
> sworn they took it out after that. It's a very clear duplicate.
Received on Thu Jan 07 2016 - 09:57:47 CST