The Unicode Consortium Discussion Forum

I propose the addition of the following 8 characters to the Unicode standard. These are common characters used in early modern English texts and Middle English texts. Each is a digraph that cannot be represented with a combination of letters.

These are essentially just two digraphs, which represent the words "the" and "that" respectively. For each there is an Early Modern English version using "y" as a base and a Middle English version using a "þ" (from which the later "y" version developed), giving us four variants. Of these I have listed a capital and a small letter variant, giving 8 in all.

The proposed additions are:

*Latin capital letter Y with e above
*Latin small letter Y with e above
*Latin capital letter Y with t above
*Latin small letter Y with t above
*Latin capital letter Thorn with e above
*Latin small letter Thorn with e above
*Latin capital letter Thorn with t above
*Latin small letter Thorn with t above

I can supply if required mock-ups in SVG format and images of texts using the characters, which are common enough.

While you can't formally "propose" using this forum, it's a good spot to collect the details all in one place and get some feedback. I personally have no skin in this particular game, but I would suggest you find a stable place where you can post some samples and link them here. (If anyone's done a print representation of these, those samples would be the most interesting).

If you have credentials in the field, would be good to mention those as well. Likewise if you, for example, work in contact with the likely user community eagerly awaiting the ability to create texts with these characters. (The characters may exist, but if nobody plans on using them...).

People with real opinions (well-founded or not) should show up shortly. :D

(SVG is something that's of little interest - not something that figures in the character encoding process as it is currently run - if you are curious how formal proposals are done, if you want to eventually submit one, see the home page under "Proposed Changes / Submitting Character Proposals")

That is very helpful, thank you. (Incidentally, I missed a pair: Latin w with t above.)

I was preparing the academic firepower, proposal specs, references, links to photographed typescripts and manuscripts etc when I found that all of this can be worked with "Combining letters", in particular U+0364 and U+036D. The only remaining problem with it is that they do not work well with capital letters (not U+036D generally) as the extra height is too much for the font specs, but that appears to be a matter to be taken up with font designers. This will be my main thrust therefore.

Glad you could resolve that these are already encoded. Next year, Unicode will reach a 25 year milestone from the Unicode88 position paper. No wonder, it's getting harder and harder to find genuinely unencoded characters.