Re: Ligatures in Turkish and Azeri, was: Accented ij ligatures

From: Peter Kirk (peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com)
Date: Sat Jul 12 2003 - 06:25:07 EDT

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: Ligatures in Turkish and Azeri, was: Accented ij ligatures"

    On 11/07/2003 11:18, Philippe Verdy wrote:

    ># T: special case for uppercase I and dotted uppercase I
    ># - For non-Turkic languages, this mapping is normally not used.
    ># - For Turkic languages (tr, az), this mapping can be used instead of the normal mapping for these characters.
    >
    >
    <snip>

    >Is that what is called a "character subset" for a scripted language family? Well I don't like the term "Turkic" to name it. I prefer the more common "Altaic Latin alphabet", seen as a standard subset of the Latin script, with additional properties.
    >
    >May be Unicode should not try to use language codes for families of languages, but it could define "representative subsets of characters" which may contain characters from several scripts, but would be minimized according to the tradition of a family of languages. Such families seem evident from the current ISO-8859-* and Mac/Windows/DOS charsets.
    >
    >-- Philippe.
    >
    >
    >
    >
    Thank you, Philippe. Well, I am glad to read "not normally used" rather
    than "must not be used" as this allows mapping T to be used for other
    languages when appropriate.

    I also don't like the word Turkic here. This is a linguistic term for a
    language family, see
    http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=710. Turkish and Azeri
    are Turkic languages, but there are many Turkic languages which don't
    use this case mapping, either because they use other alphabets
    (Cyrillic, Arabic, occasionally Hebrew, perhaps even Greek) or because
    they use a Latin alphabet with the regular case mapping as in Uzbek and
    Turkmen. There are also some non-Turkic minority languages which need
    the T case mapping. "Altaic Latin alphabet" is a reasonable alternative,
    although again Altaic is a language family name, covering Turkic,
    Mongolian and Tungus, see
    http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=709, and as far as I
    know mapping T is not needed for any Mongolian or Tungusic languages.

    Does anyone know of a good resource on the web, or elsewhere, listing
    the alphabets used for different languages around the world? I know a
    project was attempted a few years ago at least for Europe. It would be
    useful to have this kind of data available somewhere even with no
    official status. 

    -- 
Peter Kirk
peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/

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