Re: Uppercasing letters in Canadian aboriginal languages

From: Donald Z. Osborn (dzo@bisharat.net)
Date: Thu Sep 18 2008 - 05:40:48 CDT

  • Next message: =?windows-1250?Q?António MARTINS-Tuválkin?=: "Re: Character list for European and Canadian use in the revised keyboard standard ISO/IEC 9995-3, supplementing MES-1"

    Hi Karl, This is an issue that came up in the context of some African
    extended-Latin orthographies as well. See for instance the thread
    beginning
    http://lists.kabissa.org/lists/archives/public/a12n-collaboration/msg00461.html (the topic resurfaced at various
    times).

    There are apparently over 140 such lower case characters with no
    uppercase (see
    http://lists.kabissa.org/lists/archives/public/a12n-collaboration/msg00737.html ). Not sure how many are actively used in
    orthographies.

    Don Osborn

    Quoting Karl Pentzlin <karl-pentzlin@acssoft.de>:

    >
    > The document L2/05-194 as found on
    > http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2005/05194r-n2962r-glottal.pdf
    > shows an uppercase sample of the Thompson (N?e?kepmxcin) language to
    > demonstrate the caseless use of the letter U+0294 (encircled in the
    > sample but not subject here), attached here as example1.png .
    >
    > Looking more in detail, it appears that there letters which are no
    > basic Latin letters are not uppercased at all, especially:
    > U+02B7 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL W
    > (for which exists no formal uppercase, but U+1D42 MODIFIER LETTER
    > CAPITAL W could act as uppercase, and in fact from the appearance
    > only it is not clearly distinguishable).
    > U+019B LATIN SMALL LETTER LAMBDA WITH STROKE
    > (for which does not exist an uppercase equivalent in Unicode anyhow)
    > U+0259 LATIN SMALL LETTER SCHWA or (not determinable by appearance)
    > U+01DD LATIN SMALL LETTER REVERSED E
    > (for which uppercase equivalents exist for any of the both possible
    > interpretations).
    >
    > Is this (i.e. not uppercasing letters beside the basic Latin ones
    > in an otherwise uppercased text) a common or widespread practice in
    > Canadian aboriginal languages?
    >
    > - Karl Pentzlin
    >



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Sep 18 2008 - 05:45:17 CDT