JTC1/SC2/WG2 N2973
Date: 2005-08-16
From: Mamady Doumbouya [mamady@fakoli.net]
Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2005 11:52 AM
To: Mike Ksar
Cc: baba@kanjamadi.com; Karamo Jammeh; 'Michael Everson'
Subject: Character names Correction
Dear
Mr. Ksar,
We
have reviewed the many comments about the N'Ko
encoding and believe that correction of the character names of three of the
characters could assist in relieving confusion.
We
originally proposed the name "OLD LETTER" for three of the characters,
thinking that this would help people know that these letters were previously
used in early N'Ko spelling, before the script's
inventor, Solomana Kante,
replaced these three with a new set of four letters. We have seen that the word
"OLD" seems to mislead some people to think that these are just glyph
variants of the letters, which is not how we treat them. The word for
"old" in N'Ko is "kodo",
but that is not the word we used to describe these letters; we use "jona" which means something more like "classic".
Because
N'Ko names are used for other characters (NKO LETTER
NYA WOLOSO, NKO LETTER NA WOLOSO, NKO SYMBOL OO DENNEN), it would be consistent
to use the N'Ko name for these letters too. So,
instead of NKO LETTER OLD JA, NKO LETTER OLD CHA, and NKO LETTER OLD RA, we
would strongly recommend that the names be changed to NKO LETTER JONA JA, NKO
LETTER JONA CHA, and NKO LETTER JONA RA.
Finally,
we would like to request the correction of a spelling error in one of the
names: for U+07F6 NKO SYMBOL OO DEENE, the correct name should be NKO SYMBOL OO
DENNEN.
Yours
sincerely,
Mamady Doumbouya
President
N'Ko Institute
Cc.
Baba Mamadi Diane, Professor of N'Ko and Publisher
Karamo Jammeh, N'Ko Author and Publisher
Michael Everson, WG2 delegate from