Re: Preliminary proposal to encode Unifon in the UCS.

I do have a few comments and questions I'd like to make about N4262.

αʹ) I think LATIN LETTER TURNED-E R should be disunified from U+025A LATIN LETTER SCHWA WITH HOOK. I don't think the identity of the new capital character matches the established identity of U+025A. Of the five glyphs provided for LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED-E R, I think the first one is the best choice. The second glyph resembles ɚ too closely (confusable!), and the other three use a small capital r which doesn't seem fitting.

βʹ) Should the glyph for LATIN SMALL LETTER CHE extend below the baseline, like in the Metelko alphabet? Obviously this doesn't matter for Unifon, where the character will appear as a small capital anyway. However, this could make it look too similar to U+0265 LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED H.

γʹ) On page 7, there are two characters that "derive from earlier versions of Unifon." The letter on the right is clearly U+023D LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH BAR, but the character on the left is discussed nowhere else in the document. What is it? I honestly can't tell.

δʹ) In the Lepsius text example on page 5, on the sixth line I see a delta-looking symbol. I assume this is U+1E9F LATIN SMALL LETTER DELTA. Since this is normally-cased text, is there any evidence of a LATIN CAPITAL LETTER DELTA, or is this particular letter just an anomaly?

εʹ) LATIN LETTER OVERTURNED WINEGLASS stands out to me as an odd character name. I know that a few other characters, such as U+0264 LATIN SMALL LETTER RAMS HORN, have such illustrative names, but this still seems like an odd name choice to me. However, I cannot think of a more fitting name.

ϛʹ) The only Unifon alphabets that use LATIN LETTER TLE put it at the very beginning of the alphabet. Will the finished proposal sort TLE before A? Could this have a negative impact on collation? (I notice that N4262 does not address the issue of collation for any character.)

That's all I can think of for now.

—Ben Scarborough
Received on Wed May 30 2012 - 22:12:13 CDT