>
>
> John Cowan asked:
>
> /> Where does this strange beast come from? /
>
> Semitic transliteration practice, if I recall correctly.
>
> /> Its name is LATIN SMALL LETTER /
> /> A WITH RIGHT HALF RING, and the right half ring is indeed above the
> "a". /
> /> We don't have a RIGHT HALF RING ABOVE combining mark, so it only
> gets a /
> /> compatibility decomposition. /
>
> It's not really an *above* diacritic, but a little 02BE hamza half ring
> sitting at the upper right shoulder. The Unicode 3.0 glyph looks odd
> to me -- the Unicode 2.0 glyph made more sense.
>
> It's more akin to U+0149 as an oddball addition to the standard.
>
> --Ken
>
> /> Who would need a lower-case letter with a unique diacritic, and no
> upper-case /
> /> equivalent? The U+1Exx block is "random junk inherited from 10646
> DIS 1", /
> /> Does anyone understand it?/
The symbols a with half-ring above, e or i with half-ring above, and u
with half-ring above are used in transliterations of Ugaratic.
A comma above the letter or to the left is also often used. See
http://www.theology.edu/ugaritic/ugram01.htm.
An Ugaritic transliteration font, not in Unicode, can be downloaded from
http://journalofbiblicalstudies.org/Links/fonts.htm. The half-rings in
this font have a very odd but stylish irregular oblique form.
One could consider the half ring diacritic as a typographical variation
of U+0313 COMBINING COMMA ABOVE.
This probably should be indicated as an annotation on this character, or
COMBINING RIGHT HALF RING should be added to the Unicode set.
Note that U+02BF MODIFIER RIGHT HALF RING is encoded separately from
U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE though in Latin Letter
transliterations of Semitic languages they are used interchangeably,
depending on aesthetic considerations and whether the half ring
characters are available.
> / /
Jim Allan
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