Re: Latin Letters Capital and Small Theta

On Sun, 12 Jun 2016 08:59:30 -0700, Asmus Freytag (c) wrote:
> Just a note: for any living(!) language, it is important that Unicode not mix
> scripts, but instead *disunify characters based on script.* The reason for that
> is that in important implementations, such as URLs (domain names) there are
> restrictions that prevent script-mixing in a single label.

On Mon, 13 Jun 2016 14:41:18 +0200, Frédéric Grosshans wrote:
> Le 12/06/2016 02:20, Doug Ewell a écrit :
>> Marcel Schneider wrote:
>>
>>> While some characters were retained, others were rejected, among which
>>> the Latin Theta pair, but no mention is found of this rejection in the
>>> Non-Approval Notices.
>>
>> Lots of characters in proposals are rejected without rising to the
>> level of explicit disapproval: "Look, we said NO, and don't ask us
>> again." The Non-Approval Notices page starts with an extensive
>> description of the difference.
>>
>> At the same time, note that a few proposals, such as LATIN CAPITAL
>> LETTER SHARP S, have risen phoenix-like from the ranks of
>> non-approvaldom to become genuine encoded characters.
> And, if I I remember correctly, to proposal for the Latin letter theta
> yet has given example of the current usage of ttheta in latin
> orthography, like in Rromani
> (http://www.rromaniconnect.org/Rromanifonts.html,
> http://romani.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/whatis/status/codification.shtml
> ). I guess a proposal based on the Rromani orthography, (and with input
> for the user community, of course!) would easily be accepted.

On Mon, 13 Jun 2016 19:52:14 +0200, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> With Rromany (which has multiple orthographies in multiple scripts), the
> problem is that there's no formal standard and the rromany communities
> around countries have adapted their orthography with usages found in other
> ntational languages. There's no real academy and in fact the language is
> very fragmented, and its tradition is fact more oral than written There are
> authors of written texts but each one has adopted a convention more or less
> based on the standard orthography of another language where they live. […]
> There's actually no stable translitterators because there are competing
> orthographies depending on authors, and no formal agreements between
> authors and no academic institution which is widely recognized […]
>
> It's normal for Unicode to accept the existence of Latin orthographies that
> will use the Theta letter as a normal dual cased letter if we can
> demonstrate that authors need it and publications were easily made and
> relatively easy to find. Those publicatiosn are part of our wold cultures
> and needs to be preserved and correctly represented, even if we don't have
> any formal academy. It is even more important than encoding many new emojis
> for fun (that are recent inventions but don't have the same level of
> historic background).
>
> Being able to write all languages even if their historic tradition is oral,
> is an important and respectable goal, notably when these are living
> languages with a large speaking community. It's not something new: various
> native African languages have also adopted IPA symbols in their Latin
> orthography, and wanted to have dual case. So now we also have dual-cased
> Latin letters Alpha, Epsilon, Open O... It does not matter if IPA only
> needs lowercase, but it has become a strong common base used for
> orthographies of languages with oral traditions, and natural for them to
> expand the IPA set with capital letters for the Latin script (and another
> proof that IPA is not a separate script but a subset of the Latin script).

Thanks to all who responded in this thread. The challenge as I see it now
is to spread the word and motivate persons who are in touch with the
Rromani Standard Alphabet user communities, and are thus in a position
to write up the proposal for Latin Letters Capital and Small Theta.

As of the subsequent font issue, I believe that it will be settled quickly
by adding the new code points and duplicating the already existing glyphs of
GREEK CAPITAL THETA SYMBOL and GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA.

Hopefully,

Marcel
Received on Thu Jun 16 2016 - 05:43:27 CDT