Re: Glagolitic in Unicode 4.1

From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri Jun 03 2005 - 06:38:40 CDT

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    At 20:21 +0200 2005-06-02, ëÚ•ýžËøý êý”Ëà wrote:
    >ÑýÌý 2005.06.01 00:44, Michael Everson ¿Â ÌýÔËÒýÓ:
    >> >> 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?

    Apparently, that is the usual name for that character.

    >It seems to me that Croatian was favored in place of Old Slavic for
    >Glagolitic.

    Croatian what? Old Slavic what? Glagolitic what? Names? Characters?

    >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'').

    Unicode's Glagolitic character set is intended to
    be a superset of Glagolitic characters used in
    different parts of the Slavic-speaking world.

    >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.

    I can't see how. How?

    >Secondly, ``TROKUTASTI'' is a Croatian word (in
    >Serbian it would be ``TROUGLASTO'' and in
    >Russian ``TREUGOL'NOE'').

    So? And it's something else in Old Bulgarian, probably.

    >``SHTAPITCH'' is both Serbian and Croatian.

    What's your point? The character needed to have a
    name. Apparently it is not used in the
    Russian-speaking area, so PALOCHKA would have
    been inappropriate. Apparently, its name is
    SHTAPITCH (however you like to spell it).

    >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.

    What mistake?

    >And there is a reason why the Russian
    >typewriters all have ``yeriy'' as a separate key.

    That is Cyrillic. Glagolitic is not a font variant of Cyrillic.

    >``Yeriy'' is a standalone *sound* in Old Slavic
    >and all its successor languages which had it.

    A precomposed double-glyph was not encoded for
    Glagolitic because it could not be shown that it
    was necessary; indeed it would lead to multiple
    spellings, which is not a good thing.. To put it
    another way, you can represent a Glagolitic word
    with that sound by using a sequence of the
    Glagolitic characters YERU and INITIAL IZHE.
    Can't you?

    >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 names we used and their transliterations are
    documented in the proposal document. I don't know
    what you mean by "English". AZU means "I";

    >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.

    What is your point? We named one letter CHRIVI.
    Another way of writing that name is CHERV. The
    point is that you can use U+2C1D and U+2C4D to
    represent this letter in text. Its name does not
    prevent its use from representing Glagolitic text
    from any particular place. Nor does it imply that
    we like Serbs better than Bulgarians or Russians
    or any such thing.

    >But what about ``Nj'' and ``Lj''
    >(0x01C7-0x01CC)? From which standard they
    >originate? And you have *two* different versions
    >of capital ``NJ'' and ``LJ''!

    Those are pseudo-characters which were only
    encoded in Unicode because of votes on the
    negative ballot on the first version of ISO/IEC
    10646. They were wanted "for one-to-one
    transliteration" of Serbian and Croatian. I doubt
    anyone uses them.

    -- 
    Michael Everson * * Everson Typography *  * http://www.evertype.com
    


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