From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Mar 24 2005 - 10:56:50 CST
From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk@qaya.org>
> Well, if perhaps you could start by telling us the names of some languages
> which make the distinction in lower case, we might then be able to find
> these materials showing what they do in upper case. But we want to make
> sure that these are not examples of what Mark just called the "many
> (perhaps most) uncased characters (in bicameral scripts) that are archaic
> or special purpose (eg IPA)."
There are some resources on Bisharat.net
But also in the Unicode and ISO working papers for other letters that have
been proposed in the encoding of Extended latin letters for African
languages, such as:
http://anubis.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/open/02n3129.pdf
Unfortunately, those working documents lack the most important thing: the
justification of the choice of characters that were made part of such
character repertoire, notably the reference to at least some languages that
use them.
If one had just considered the paper above (which forgets that Latin small
alpha letter discussed in some areas), one would see that there are other
lowercase letters which are integrated without an uppercase variant. But as
this document states that these lowercase characters are necessary for
African languages, not saying for which languages they are needed does not
help finding locations where printed resources would also contain uppercase
letters.
I'm quite sure that if the lowercase letters are found in books printed in
occidental countries about these African languages, the local population
actually using these letters may already use these letters in handwritten
documents, including in their uppercase form.
The fact that there's no evidence of books in western countries to exhibit
them will not help here, but knowing the source of those letters will
certainly allow finding contacts in the relevant areas, where the letters
will be used, for people names, place names, artistic creations, local
papers and magazines.
There are some documents in French that discuss these issues, for letters
sometimes referenced by the african Language Resource Council, and not
always encoded in Unicode/ISO/IEC 10646. One example:
http://sivanataraja.free.fr/phone/non-ie/afrique/afrique.htm (vowels)
http://sivanataraja.free.fr/phone/non-ie/afrique/afrique2.htm (consonnants)
Such pages are good and informative, as it helps finding the languages that
need them, and what they represent in the orthographic systems (Note that
the document also indicates some other non-African languages using them,
notably in South-East Europe, Central Asia and the Middle-East.)
There are other interesting pages, like those on the Rosetta project,
Alphabets for Africa (but unfortunately, it only reference the lowercase
letters, even if those letters are evidently bicameral, as it is proven in
the sample texts that DO include uppercase letters as well)...
Don Osborn may certainly help here because he as tons of references for
African texts...
For now, I can quote this page on Bisharat.net, for languages of Cameroon:
http://www.bisharat.net/A12N/CAM-table.htm
the Latin small alpha is referenced and usd in writing Fe'efe'e (Grassfield
Bantu, a variant of Eastern Bamileke, poken in Cameroon), with this
reference:
http://www.rosettaproject.org:8080/live/search/showpages?ethnocode=FMP&doctype=ortho&version=0&scale=six
(this language also uses the "eng" character, and the open-o, but their
uppercase version are already encoded, unlike the Latin U with horizontal
stroke, which is not encoded and is used in lots of other African
languages).
Other countries represent the same sound or abstract letter with accents on
a regulat Latin a letter, such as a grave or macron above, or with a dot or
vertical line below, or with a apostrophe before... Other languages need
more thn one variation of the a letter (for example Nuer, alias Thok Nath,
in Sudan)...
Finally the following document by Lee Pearce, February 2003, summarizes the
current inventory (note that some of the letters exposed there have still
been encoded in Unicode/ISO/IEC 10646)
http://www.bisharat.net/A12N/AfricanSymbolsInventory2.doc
(the missing uppercase letters are in all those grey-shaded cells of the
table; of them, the uppercase Latin capital Esh for example, which looks
like a greek capital Sigma, is now encoded).
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