Re: IUC10 - Help for hardship cases

From: Chris Lilley (Chris.Lilley@sophia.inria.fr)
Date: Fri Jan 31 1997 - 13:27:50 EST


On Jan 31, 10:13am, Alain LaBont/e'/ wrote:

> At 09:23 1997-1-24 -0500, Johan van Wingen wrote:
> > The inclusion of Georgian capital letters was
> > and is very controversial

> At the CEN Seminar in Bled last fall, a Georgian confirmed me that there is
> no such thing as a notion of case in Georgian. He said that there were 2
> traditional typographical styles for this script but he did not understand
> why characters were double-coded in the UCS.

The following explanatory note, which occurs in Unicode 2.0, may be
helpful. Or it may be wrong ;-) but either way it is useful to know the
justification used. Comments in [] are mine:

"The modern Georgian script is a lowercase style [I would refer to
that as a unicameral script, ie having no case rather than having a
lower case -- CL] called <i>mkhedruli</i> (soldier's). It originated
as the secular derivative of a form called <i>khutsuri</i>
(ecclesiastical) that had uppercase and lowercase pairs. Although
no longer used in most modern texts, the <i>khutsuri</i> style is
still used for liturgical purposes; [anyone know a Georgian preist
to check?] the Unicode Standard encodes the upper-case form of <i>
khutsuri</i> as well as the lowercase form of modern Georgian."

> Perhaps the question asked by
> experts to Georgians were not precise enough at the time of UCS design for
> Georgian

Possible; or perhaps those questioned were not aware of the
ecclesiastical usage alleged in the quote above.

> and those who answered, non-experts in character coding, made a
> confusion between characters and glyphs

;-) as so often happens.

-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France



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