From: Peter_Constable@sil.org
Date: Thu Mar 27 2003 - 11:00:30 EST
David Starner wrote on 03/27/2003 12:54:18 AM:
> I've found these characters in a book called "The Annals of the
> Cakchiquels", by Daniel G. Brinton.
Thanks for this sample. I have seen the cuatrillo in some (relatively)
recent linguistics publications. Unfortunately, it was not explained in
the one source I have actually collected (I haven't actively gone looking
for it yet, but just happened upon it while looking for other things --
IJAL vol. 65, p. 456) so I appreciate the info.
> Are these still in use anywhere? Are they
> appropriate suspects for Unicode?
There still appears to be *some* use of the cuatrillo, though not a huge
amount. I'm inclined to think it's a candidate for encoding, and I've
already considered proposing it.
I have not seen the others in use, though. If the cuatrillo were encoded,
the two variants could be represented using existing combining marks and
modifier letters. For modern use, perhaps the tz could be represented just
as such, "tz", perhaps rendered with a ligature. Perhaps, though, it could
be argued that this should be encoded as a distinct (non-decomposible)
digraph character, comparable to U+02AB LATIN SMALL LETTER LZ DIGRAPH. One
might represent the tresillo as U+025B LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN E or its
uppercase counterpart U+0190, though that's probably not a good choice as
the tresillo is caseless. So, it should be encoded as a distinct, if it's
to be encoded. So, perhaps two letters, LATIN LETTER TRESILLO and LATIN
SMALL LETTER TZ DIGRAPH, are candidates for encoding, but only if there's
a user need, and I'm not aware of any. Perhaps there are historiographers
of Mayan linguistics that want to encode historic texts, or perhaps some
Mayanists that, on occasion, want to be able to quote from these historic
texts.
- Peter
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Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
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