RE: ogonek vs. retroflex hook

From: Jim Allan (jallan@smrtytrek.com)
Date: Wed Apr 02 2003 - 14:06:40 EST

  • Next message: Kenneth Whistler: "Re: letters with palatal hook"

    Joe posted:

    > c. CEDILLAS AND HOOKS:
    >
    > Two cedillas and two hooks are required as diacritical marks for bibliographic
    > transcription, and also for the proper representation of a number of languages
    > (as documented in ANSI Z39.47-1985 and ISO 5426-1983).
    >
    > These four diacritical marks are present in the USMARC character set, in ANSEL
    > (ANSI Z39.47-1985) and in the ISO extension of the Latin alphabet for
    > bibliographic use (ISO 5426-1983). Their encoding and naming in each of these
    > character sets is shown in the following table.
    >
    > USMARC ANSEL ISO USMARC NAME ANSEL NAME ISO NAME
    > (8-bit) (8-bit) (7-bit)
    > F0 15/0 5/0 cedilla cedilla cedilla
    > F8 15/8 5/1 right cedilla right cedilla rude
    > F7 15/7 5/2 left hook/tail left hook hook to left
    > F1 15/1 5/3 right hook right hook hook to right
    > or ogonek

    According to http://www.niso.org/international/SC4/Wg1_240.pdf:

    5/1 RUDE
    ISO/TC46/SC4/WG1 N 240
    The character rude ( right cedilla in MARC 21) is specious. Its only
    use (according to ANSEL and ISO 5426 although one may
    draw on the other) is in the romanization of Thai (specifically,
    according to the ALA-LC Romanization Tables). Ms. Aliprand
    discovered that this character only assumed its cedilla-like form in
    later versions of the ALA-LC romanization table for Thai. In the
    first published version of this table, the mark was simply an arc,
    similar to U+031C, COMBINING LEFT HALF RING BELOW
    (annotated IPA: open variety of vowel in the Unicode Standard). The
    choice of U+031C to represent the rude/right cedilla was
    confirmed by a professor of Thai language.
    5/2 HOOK TO LEFT
    In ISO 5426, this character is annotated used in Latvian, Romanian.
    Because of this use, the most appropriate mapping is to U+0326
    COMBINING COMMA BELOW (annotated as variant of the following [combining
    cedilla] in the Unicode Standard).

    U+0322 COMBINING RETROFLEX HOOK is not mentioned at all in commentary or
    in the Unicode identifications.

    So I continue to doubt that "combining retroflex hook" existed as an
    independant character before Unicode. The only information of usage for
    this character in the Unicode standard is "IPA: retroflexion". In fact
    this is not an IPA diacritic and never has been.

    It may be that the IPA retroflex hook modification of
    dental/alveolar/postalveolar characters was included in Unicode because
    it was incorrectly identified with a right hook in some other standard
    and remained when the other hook was withdrawn from consideration.

    Jim Allan



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