From: Benjamin M Scarborough (benjamin.scarborough@student.utdallas.edu)
Date: Mon Dec 03 2007 - 02:32:47 CST
I've come across a number of characters used for kana that are not
currently supported by Unicode and may need to be added.
http://jdlib.ntl.gov.tw/cgi-bin/browse.cgi?bookid=bjn00172v01
This is a Taiwanese-Japanese dictionary published during the Japanese
occupation of Taiwan, placed online by the National Taichung Library.
Briefly looking through the dictionary shows katakana with a number of
extensions used for pronunciation of Taiwanese words. I randomly
selected page 874 towards the bottom and found it to be a very good
example.
First are the tone marks. Out of the thirteen tone marks used in the
dictionary, ten are clearly visible on this page. The syllables consist
of two or three katakana characters with a tone mark centered over the
syllable. Unmarked syllables are tone 1.
Also visible on this particular page, on the top section, fourth column
from the left, is a yet-unencoded KATAKANA LETTER SMALL WO. Compare to
the fullsized WO directly to the left.
Lastly, there are two combining marks visible on individual characters:
a combining line above and a combining dot below. These could be
unified with U+0305 COMBINING OVERLINE and U+0323 COMBINING DOT BELOW
respectively.
http://www.geocities.jp/itikun01/hibi/zat2.html
At the above site is evidence of KATANAKA LETTER YI, KATAKANA LETTER
YE, KATAKANA LETTER WU, HIRAGANA LETTER YI, and HIRAGANA LETTER YE.
They apparently were introduced in the Meiji era but never entered
common usage. However, I have not been able to find instances of any of
these five characters in use.
If any of these characters are indeed potential additions to Unicode, I
propose making a new Katakana Extended-A block at U+AAE0..U+AAFF.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Dec 03 2007 - 02:35:47 CST