From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Tue Sep 28 2004 - 11:56:42 CST
On 28/09/2004 17:09, Eric Muller wrote:
> Michael Everson wrote:
>
>> At 08:12 -0700 2004-09-28, Eric Muller wrote:
>>
>>> It seems that Abkhaz, written in Cyrillic, uses a PE WITH DESCENDER,
>>> but I can't find this case pair in Unicode. I am missing something,
>>> or do we need to encode those?
>>
>>
>>
>> U+04A6, U+04A7 are used in Abkhaz for that sound, I believe.
>
>
>
> Isn't it problematic to have the distinction between (MIDDLE) HOOK and
> DESCENDER for GHE (494/4F6), KA (4C3/49A) and arguably EN (4C7/4C9)
> but not for PE?
>
> That being said, I am not trying to beat the master of disunification
> 8-) If we agree that 4A6/7 is it, then we need at least an annotation
> "can be rendered with a descender instead of a hook", or may be go all
> the way for a change of the representative glyph to use a descender,
> since that is the form used in both D&B and in the Abkhaz font.
>
> Thanks,
> Eric.
>
I was looking a few days ago at other missing Cyrillic characters, for
Chukchi, Itelmen, Nivkh etc, e.g. those listed towards the end of
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=DoulosSIL_Technical
It seems from this, and from my own experience with Azerbaijani and
other languages of that region, that although there are various
descenders and additions added to Cyrillic letters for various
alphabets, the distinctions between them are glyph variations rather
than character differences. I think that there are rarely two different
additions to the same base character in any one language, and probably
never two different descenders. The actual form of the addition can be
very variable. For example in Azerbaijani Cyrillic 04B8/04B9 are usually
handwritten as if they were 04B6/04B7, and 049C/049D are handwritten as
049A/049B and sometimes printed like K with a cross across its bottom
right branch. The apparent differences, certainly between WITH
DESCENDER, WITH HOOK and WITH TAIL, seem to result from local or
regional typographical preferences rather than real character distinctions.
I don't of course want to unify any characters which are already encoded
distinctly, although I might have argued for more unification if I had
been involved earlier. But I would want to caution against adding
further characters which may simply be regionally preferred glyph variants.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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