From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Tue May 31 2005 - 15:42:52 CDT
At 21:14 +0200 2005-05-31, ëÚ•ýžËøý êý”Ëà wrote:
>ÑýÌý 2005.05.23 22:17, Kenneth Whistler ¿Â ÌýÔËÒýÓ:
>> The burden of proof at this point would be for demonstrating that
>> a digraphic representation is insufficient, so that a separate
>> Glagolitic digraph for this would need to be added to the standard.
>
> By using this kind of reasoning, we would end up asking why the heck
>was ``fi'' or ``ffi'' encoded when these two can be expressed with their
>corresponding atoms,
And should be. Those were encoded for
compatibility with a number of pre-Unicode
character sets.
>or, more closer to what I asked, why the
>Cyrillic ``yeriy'' was encoded as a standalone
>character, when it could be happily represented
>with a soft sign + ``deseteric'' (dotless) i?
Cyrillic "yeriy" was also encoded as a unitary
character because in modern (especially Russian)
information processing it has always been
considered one. (Some old Cyrillic yers and i's
of varyous compositions are not precomposed.)
>And why there is no dotless i in Cyrillic?
Is one needed? Is one attested?
>It is used in some Serbo-slavic texts from from the XIX century.
Ah. Can you supply evidence? And does it contrast
with dotted i? (Irish texts in Gaelic script use
an i without a dot, but it is not the "Turkic
dotless i", it's just a glyph variant of i.
> And nobody answered my other questions:
I forwarded them to Professor Cleminson who is on holiday.
> 1) Why the variant characters were encoded? Ex: ``LATINATE MYSLITE'' is
>a variant of ``MYSLITE'', which should be expressed font-wise, NOT
>standard-wise?
Professor Cleminson (and/or his colleagues) had
evidence of its contrastive use, I believe. I do
not have this material to hand.
> 2) What does ``LATINATE'' mean and in what language?
It is English and means "Latin-like". It refers
to the shape of the character, which looks not
like Glagolitic MYSLITE but like Latin M.
> 3) Why ``SHTAPIC'' and not ``PALOCHKA'' or ``STICK''? And could someone
>explain to me what is the use of this character?
It's used in the Balkans, not in Russia, so a
Balkan Slavic name was used. It is some sort of
soft sign if I recall.
> 4) Why ``SMALL LETTER IOTATED SMALL YUS'' instead of ``SMALL LETTER
>IOTIFIED LITTLE YUS'', which in my opinion would be more compatible with the
>Cyrillic counterpart?
No particular reason I can remember. BIG/LITTLE,
and BIG/SMALL, both work in English. I did insist
on IOTATED because that is a "reasonable" English
word, and "IOTIFIED" is very bad terminology
indeed.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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