1. Introduction

1.1. Overview

This contribution addresses the proposed addition to ISO/IEC 10646:1 of various characters which come from sources other than library standards developed by ISO/TC 46/SC 4. The characters are proposed in the following documents:

N 1741: Additional Latin characters for the UCS

N 1742: Additional IPA characters for the UCS

N 1743: Additional Greek characters for the UCS

N 1744: Additional Cyrillic characters for the UCS

N 1746: Additional combining characters for the UCS

2. Comments on Specific Proposals

2.1. N 1741: Additional Latin characters for the UCS

0222 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z WITH HOOK

0223 LATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH HOOK

NCITS/L2 and the Unicode Consortium recommend addition of these two characters to ISO/IEC 10646 with the proposed names and code positions.

0224 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER OU

0225 LATIN SMALL LETTER OU

NCITS/L2 and the Unicode Consortium have grave concerns about the cloning of letters that are clearly derived from another script.

Editorial: The code points for these characters in the list are erroneous. (The code table is correct.)

2.2. N 1742: Additional IPA characters for the UCS

NCITS/L2 and the Unicode Consortium recommend preparation of a new proposal for IPA characters with the following contents:

The first four characters in this proposal
The last two characters (034F and 0350) from N 1746

The last three characters in this proposal (02AD through 02AF) which are IPA clones of Greek letters should not be proposed until the issue of script-specific clones of characters is resolved.

2.3. N 1743: Additional Greek characters for the UCS

03D7 GREEK KAI SYMBOL

03F4 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OU

03F5 GREEK SMALL LETTER OU

NCITS/L2 and the Unicode Consortium recommend addition of these three characters to ISO/IEC 10646 with the proposed names and code positions.

03D8 GREEK KAI SYMBOL WITH VARIA

NCITS/L2 and the Unicode Consortium consider that there is no need to add this character. Once the proposed GREEK KAI SYMBOL has been added, the GREEK KAI SYMBOL WITH VARIA would then also be encoded using existing ISO/IEC 10646 characters. The argument that all Greek characters must be implementable at Level 1 is not convincing when dealing with characters such as this that derive from manuscript traditions, rather than with general modern-use Greek characters.

2.4. N 1744: Additional Cyrillic characters for the UCS

051A CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER EL WITH DESCENDER

through

0523 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER E WITH DIAERESIS

051A CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER EL WITH DESCENDER

051C CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER ER WITH TICK

051E CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SHORT I WITH DESCENDER

0520 CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER EM WITH DESCENDER

0522 CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER E WITH DIAERESIS

Only the lower case forms of these characters are found in the Kildin Sámi alphabet (as documented by the Sámi Sector of the Murmansk Branch of the Russian Academy of Science, WG2 number for this document not yet assigned).

NCITS/L2 and the Unicode Consortium consider that these upper case characters should not be added to ISO/IEC 10646 because there is insufficient evidence to document their use.

0523 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER E WITH DIAERESIS

This character is part of the Kildin Sámi alphabet. NCITS/L2 and the Unicode Consortium consider that there is no need to add this character as it is already encoded with existing ISO/IEC 10646 characters.

NCITS/L2 and the Unicode Consortium recommend addition of the remaining four characters with the recommended names and code positions.

2.5. N 1746: Additional combining characters for the UCS

See N 1742: Additional IPA characters for the UCS above.