RE: Text scans needed containing slashed letters of 19/20th century Latvian and Sorbian orthography

From: Lucans, Gunars (gunars@spss.com)
Date: Mon Oct 27 2008 - 09:34:25 CST

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    Hello Karl,

    You might find some Latvian examples at: http://www.ailab.lv/SENIE

    This is a project of the University of Latvia's (LU) Philology department's Baltic language section and the LU Artificial Intelligence Lab to form a corpus of early Latvian written texts.

    On page http://www.ailab.lv/SENIE/senie.jsp, you can find links to 16, 17 and 18th century texts. Some of the texts have a section "originala faksimils" that are scans of the original texts. For example:

    http://www.ailab.lv/SENIE/source.jsp?codificator=SL1789
    http://valoda.ailab.lv/korpuss/senie/faksimili/18gs/SL1789
    http://valoda.ailab.lv/korpuss/senie/faksimili/18gs/SL1789/0012a.htm

    As far as I know (I'm certainly not an expert), the slashed versions of G, K, L, N, R are precursors to the current versions of these letters with cedilla (written as under-commaaccent). The slashed S is precursor to the current S-caron.

    I also thought these were introduced around 1850, but there appear to be examples here also. If you look at the fourth line in http://valoda.ailab.lv/korpuss/senie/faksimili/18gs/SL1789/0012a.htm, you can see the slashed-n character, even though this document is from 1789. On the other hand, the 3 character cluster after it would be the equivalent of the slashed-s (currently s-cedilla).

    Hopefully this gives a bit of a clue where to find more information.

    Regards
    Gunars Lucans

    -----Original Message-----
    From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of Karl Pentzlin
    Sent: Sunday, October 26, 2008 6:05 PM
    To: Unicode Mailing List
    Cc: domowina-bautzen@sorben.com; fabian.kaulfuerst@serbski-institut.de; si@serbski-institut.de; baltist@uni-greifswald.de; spricis@acad.lanet.lv; silvija.pavidis@lu.lv
    Subject: Text scans needed containing slashed letters of 19/20th century Latvian and Sorbian orthography

    Hello everybody,
    I am working on a proposal to encode letters which occur in 19th century Latvian and early 20th century Lower Sorbian orthography.

    These are the slashed versions of G/g, K/k, N/n, R/r, and S/s.
    All of these occur in 19th century Latvian; the slashed S/s occurs in early 20th century Lower Sorbian.

    You find the draft of my proposal (entitled: "Proposal to encode 10 Latin letters with diagonal stroke") at:
    http://www.pentzlin.com/Diagonalstrokes.pdf

    To complete this proposal, I need any scans or digital photographs from text containing the proposed letters, with the bibliographical information regarding these texts.
    (Especially, I hope to get more appropriate examples of 19th century Latvian orthography as the fig. 2 contained in the 2008-10-26 draft of my proposal.)

    I would appreciate any such texts or any other comments regarding my proposal, especially if I could get them in time to finish my proposal this week (last week of October 2008), in time to the next UTC meeting.
    You can mail me privately to (in English or German):
    karl-pentzlin (at) europatastatur (dot) de.

    Many thanks in advance for any help.

    Best wishes
    Karl Pentzlin

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