From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Tue May 17 2005 - 05:30:22 CDT
I have received some comments from Professor Cleminson in reply to
points made by Mr Savenkov.
=====
>And hence, the ordering of letters should not be taken from Greek ordering.
>
>The order of the letters in the code table is traditionally found in
>numerous materials.
And to quote the proposal itself, "the order of the alphabet as
represented by the surviving documents is not entirely stable,
particularly towards the end." What we have in the Unicode table is
as good as we're going to get; one could
have made as good a case for a number of different orders, but not a
better one, and the differences between them are fairly trivial
anyway. It is however not open to doubt that when St Cyril
originally devised the alphabet the models for its order were Greek
and Hebrew.
>>1.One letter is missing: it is letter Uk that looks like this:
>>O_
>>O
>>
>>(two overlapping circles one on top of another with a stick coming
>>from the middle to the right side of the letter).
>
> If a character is really missing it may be added.
Indeed, though as far as I can see this is nothing more than U+2C5B.
>>2.Another major concern: variants of the glyphs. There are not
>>many of them so why not include them into the standard?
>
>Because they are just glyph variants.
Obviously.
>>The difference is that letter Kako means "how" and the one with missing
>>part has a function of question connotation in the sentence, replacing
>>need of a question mark which was not there originally.
I have no idea what this is all about.
>>missing letter Init' (i with double dots in Cyrillic)
This is the traditional Cyrillic transcription for U+2C39, which is
there, so again, I don't see what he means.
>>3. So-called "Spidery Ha" is called Ho'lmo'
This is simply wrong. The use of the letter in the few MSS where it
occurs is to write the word U+2C52-2C3E-2C4F-2C3F-2C4F, but this has
no implications for the name of the letter, and there is NO direct
evidence in the primary
sources for what that was.
The name "spidery ha" (Bulgarian pajakovidno ha, Russ. paukoobraznoe
ha) is therefore admittedly modern (as we say in so many words in the
proposal) but it is the one in normal use. It has been recently
argued (Miklas, Karpenko) that the letter was originally intended to
be "sunny" rather than "spidery", and
this may well be true, but it doesn't seem to have had any impact on
usage so far.
>>4. Everson's letter i is actually "izhe", it's numeric value is 20;
>>5. Everson's letter INITIAL IZHE is actually "init", numeric value 10;
Again, I don't really understand what is meant. U+23C9 and 23CA are
both called "izhe" and both have numerical value 10; U+23CB is called
"i" and has the numerical value 20. This is well-established fact
and there is no point in arguing about it. Since for the purposes of
Unicode we need to have distinct names for U+23C9 and 23CA, and since
the latter tends to occur more frequently
in word-initial position, we have called the latter "initial izhe",
without pretending that this is anything other than a modern name
reflecting general, rather than exclusive usage.
=====
I have conveyed my gratitude to Professor Cleminson for taking the
time to answer these questions.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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