Re: Glagolitic in Unicode 4.1

From: Страхиња Радић (vilinkamen@mail.ru)
Date: Thu Jun 02 2005 - 13:21:39 CDT

  • Next message: Hans Aberg: "Re: Ligatures fi and ffi"

    Дана 2005.06.01 00:44, Michael Everson је написао:
    > >> It's used in the Balkans, not in Russia, so a
    > >> Balkan Slavic name was used. It is some sort of
    >
    > >Is it really (Old) Slavic?
    >
    > No, I don't think so.

            And... ? Why that name was chosen then?

            It seems to me that Croatian was favored in place of Old Slavic for
    Glagolitic. For start, in the Croatian version of the Glagolitic there is no
    ``yeriy'', as opposed to (original) Old Slavic version (ie. the Bulgarian
    version maintained the original Old Slavic ``yeriy''). Ok, so you could add
    Croatian-specific chars to the foundation of Old Slavic ones and everybody
    would be happy. But that didn't happen. Instead, the Old Slavic version of
    Glagolitic was crippled.

            Secondly, ``TROKUTASTI'' is a Croatian word (in Serbian it would be
    ``TROUGLASTO'' and in Russian ``TREUGOL'NOE''). ``SHTAPITCH'' is both Serbian
    and Croatian. I know the policies of the Unicode Consortium, and that nothing
    can be changed, renamed or deleted, however, I think ``yeriy'' can and should
    be *added*, correcting the mistake. And there is a reason why the Russian
    typewriters all have ``yeriy'' as a separate key. ``Yeriy'' is a standalone
    *sound* in Old Slavic and all its successor languages which had it. Also, in my
    opinion, it would be better if the names were in (more general) Old Slavic or
    English, instead in modern Serbian or Croatian. The official linguistic
    oppinion is that the Glagolitic was invented for all Slavs, and not just one
    part of them. Some other philologists say that the Glagolitic was just
    optimized and sorted by St. Cyril and that he didn't *invent* it. Either way,
    it is a general (Old) Slavic script, and not the sole property of any
    particular Slavic nation.

            Maybe ``fi'' and ``ffi'' are not so good as examples. Ok, they are
    ligatures and they existed in some older standards. But what about ``Nj'' and
    ``Lj'' (0x01C7-0x01CC)? From which standard they originate? And you have *two*
    different versions of capital ``NJ'' and ``LJ''!

            As for the dotless ``i'', it was used by Serbian philologist Savo
    Mrkaly, and its primary use was for modern ``JE''-sound for which Vuk
    Karadzhich used ``j'', but it also had some other uses. It is also not taken
    from Turkic dotless ``i'', which was devised in XX century, but from Greek
    ``iota''. I am currently searching for Mrkaly's work ``Сало дебелога јера'' and
    I will scan it, and post the links to the important scanned parts when I find
    it.

            Best regards,
            Strahinya

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