There is a character missing in Unicode 3.0 that should be included.
I was minding my own business, making a Unicode compatible Turkmen font
that would handle both the "old" Cyrillic and the "new" Turkmen Latin
when I discovered a problem:
A missing upside down J
The Turkmenbashyr decided to change from the old Turkmen Cyrillic to a
new Turkish Latin a few years ago. The Cyrillic had extra Central Asian
specific Cyrillic characters. Unicode 3.0 handles all those characters
just fine, but..... the new Turkish Latin has additional characters as
well. Most can be handled easily with characters in the 0000 to 017F
range, but there are a couple oddballs. There is an uppercase "Y Slash"
which can be drawn from the Cyrillic range (04B0) with a lowercase y
umlaut (same character) (00FF). OK, no problem, wierd but Unicode will
handle it. There is also an uppercase and lowercase upside down "J".
The lowercase J could be drawn from the Internal Phoney Alphabet, (I
think that's the Alphabet 'Enry 'Iggins used in My Fair Lady.)(A Rewrite
of Pygmalian for you uncultured folk, and with a better ending, too!) at
character 027E, but there is no uppercase. I mapped the glyph in my font
to 017F (ye olde englische S) but it is really a misuse of the
character. A character should be assigned to this J, since it IS a part
of a LIVE alphabet.
I propose the character be called "STEPHAN'S SPECIAL TURKMEN J ROTATED
540 DEGREES", but I imagine someone will nix that idea.
I am being totaly serious about the upside down J, it is part of the new
Turkmen Turkish Latin alphabet, and it should be included in Unicode. I
hope it is not included in 3.0 and I am not making a fool out of myself,
(I'm sure someone will gleefully point it out if I am). If it hasn't
been looked at, it should be.
-Stephan Peters
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