The following pre-proposal suggests a unification of the
archaic Etruscan and Gothic scripts with Unicode Greek, requiring
the addition of a few letters in the Greek block for the
un-unifiable residuum. Given the preliminary decision to use
L2R ordering for Etruscan, it looks just like an archaic
variant of Greek; Gothic, in turn, looks like typical
Greek minuscule writing with a few oddball letters.
The advantage of this scheme is that (at the expense of some
space in the Greek block) these languages, like Coptic, become
representable on the BMP; in addition, 27 + 31 - 11 = 47 codepoints
are saved.
Here is the proposed unification table:
Unicode Greek Gothic Etruscan
U+0391 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA GOTHIC A ETRUSCAN A
U+0392 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER BETA GOTHIC B ETRUSCAN B
U+0393 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER GAMMA GOTHIC G ETRUSCAN C (1)
U+0394 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER DELTA GOTHIC D ETRUSCAN D
U+0395 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON GOTHIC E ETRUSCAN E
U+03DC GREEK LETTER DIGAMMA GOTHIC F ETRUSCAN V (2)
U+03xx (unassigned) GOTHIC Q
U+0396 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ZETA GOTHIC Z ETRUSCAN Z
U+0397 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ETA GOTHIC H (3) ETRUSCAN H (3)
U+0398 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER THETA GOTHIC TH (4) ETRUSCAN TH
U+0399 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER IOTA GOTHIC I ETRUSCAN I
U+039A GREEK CAPITAL LETTER KAPPA GOTHIC K ETRUSCAN K
U+039B GREEK CAPITAL LETTER LAMDA GOTHIC L ETRUSCAN L
U+039C GREEK CAPITAL LETTER MU GOTHIC M ETRUSCAN M
U+039D GREEK CAPITAL LETTER NU GOTHIC N ETRUSCAN N
U+03xx (unassigned) GOTHIC J
U+03xx (unassigned) GOTHIC U
U+03xx GREEK CAPITAL LETTER XI ETRUSCAN S (5)
U+039F GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMICRON ETRUSCAN O
U+03A0 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER PI GOTHIC P ETRUSCAN P
U+03xx (unassigned) ETRUSCAN SH
U+03DE GREEK LETTER KOPPA ETRUSCAN Q (6)
U+03A1 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER RHO GOTHIC R ETRUSCAN R
U+03A3 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER SIGMA GOTHIC S (7) ETRUSCAN S
U+03A4 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER TAU GOTHIC T ETRUSCAN T
U+03A5 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER UPSILON GOTHIC W ETRUSCAN U
U+03A6 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER PHI ETRUSCAN PH
U+03A7 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER CHI GOTHIC X ETRUSCAN SS
U+03A8 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER PSI ETRUSCAN KH
U+03xx GOTHIC HV
U+03A9 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA GOTHIC O
U+03xx (unassigned) GOTHIC 90
U+03xx (unassigned) GOTHIC 900
U+03xx (unassigned) ETRUSCAN F
U+03xx (unassigned) UMBRIAN ERS
U+03xx (unassigned) UMBRIAN CHE
U+03xx (unassigned) OSCAN II
U+03xx (unassigned) OSCAN UU
Notes:
1. Etruscan C is used for both the voiced and unvoiced velar stops,
which were not phonemically distinct. Latin used C for the unvoiced
stop only, and invented C WITH STROKE = G for the voiced stop.
2. Similarly, Etruscan used the DIGAMMA for F or V; Latin used it
for F only. Gothic presumably borrowed the Latin form (the DIGAMMA
was long obsolete in Wulfila's time), but for the sake of uniformity,
all of this history is unified away here.
3. Greek ETA was used in Attic script with the value of
Latin H (rough breathing), from which Latin, Etruscan,
and Gothic (directly or indirectly) all borrowed it.
4. The Gothic TH character looks more like Greek PSI, but its
position makes it clear that its abstract shape is that of THETA.
5. Note that this Etruscan S is distinct from the S that corresponds
to SIGMA. Everson's version of this proposal calls this value ESH,
and designates the Etruscan SH as SHE.
6. Etruscan Q and Greek KOPPA have the same abstract shape
(as does Latin Q); archaic versions of Greek KOPPA look just like
the Etruscan version.
7. Gothic, Etruscan, Latin S and Greek SIGMA all have the same
abstract shape; the Latin form was a common variant in writing Greek.
In this proposal, 11 new characters are required in the Greek block.
I suggest that they be placed at U+03F5-03FF, as follows:
U+03F5 GOTHIC LETTER QAIRTHRA
U+03F6 GOTHIC LETTER JER
U+03F7 GOTHIC LETTER URUS
U+03F8 GOTHIC LETTER HWAIR
U+03F9 GOTHIC NUMBER NINETY
U+03FA GOTHIC NUMBER NINE HUNDRED
U+03FB ETRUSCAN LETTER SH
U+03FC UMBRIAN LETTER ERS
U+03FD UMBRIAN LETTER CHE
U+03FE OSCAN LETTER II
U+03FF OSCAN LETTER UU
Note that the names begin with the language name, contrary to the
usual SC2 character-naming rules; this seems to be
customary in the Greek block, which uses COPTIC LETTER XXX
rather than GREEK LETTER COPTIC XXX (presumably because
GREEK is thought of as primarily a language name rather
than a script name).
-- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban
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