Re: Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Thu Apr 30 2009 - 13:37:25 CDT

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    Marvin Harder asked:

    > ... A problem that we have encountered is
    > that the characters represented in the following designations are
    > identified by the people of Nunavik as specific to Nunavut (Northwest
    > Territories, Canada):
    >
    > 158E, 158F, 1590, 1591, 1592, 1593, 1594, 1595, and 1670

    For those not actually looking at the Unicode charts, that is the
    entire series involving initial eng.

    >
    > Nunavik versions of these characters are similar to those of Nunavut
    > but not the same. How do we go about requesting unicode support for
    > Nunavik specific syllabic characters?

    Well, the first thing to do would be to provide a description
    about exactly what the perceived difference is. Posting an
    image demonstrating the distinct forms used by Nunavik
    would be helpful.

    I am assuming that since the question is about the entire eng
    syllabic series, the issue may be with the shape of the
    eng element common to all of these,
    i.e. that which appears by itself in U+1595.

    The next hurdle will be dealing with the question as to
    whether any differences between Nunavut and Nunavik forms
    were *intentionally* unified when the UCAS repertoire was
    first proposed and championed by the Canadian national body
    for encoding. For that, it would help if someone involved
    with the original proposal a decade ago could provide any
    information about the process of the original unification
    and whether it actually considered distinctions between
    Nunavut and Nunavik usage.

    That would help in determining whether the distinctions
    are best treated as a font design issue, or whether actually
    distinct character encodings would be warranted.

    --Ken



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