Greek Extended: question: missing glyphs?

From: Pim Rietbroek (pimr@euronet.nl)
Date: Mon Apr 29 2002 - 22:37:11 EDT


Hello,

Please forgive me if this question has been raised before: I am a newbie
on this list.

I am looking into the Unicode standard for the encoding of Classical
Greek. While both the Greek and the Greek Extended ranges of the
current Unicode Standard seem to cover most of the essentials, it looks
strange to me that there some Greek extended glyphs have not been
defined. They are:

1) GREEK CAPITAL LETTER UPSILON WITH PSILI
[code point U+1F58 is "reserved"]
2) GREEK CAPITAL LETTER UPSILON WITH PSILI AND VARIA
[code point U+1F5A is "reserved"]
3) GREEK CAPITAL LETTER UPSILON WITH PSILI AND OXIA
[code point U+1F5C is "reserved"]
4) GREEK CAPITAL LETTER UPSILON WITH PSILI AND PERISPOMENI
[code point U+1F5E is "reserved"]
I don't know what "reserved" means in this context, BTW.

Why have these glyphs been left out--does anybody know? They must be
rare, but they may--and one at least does--occur in the Aeolic dialect,
which exhibits the phenomenon of psilosis (loss of aspiration at the
beginning of words). I have long felt uneasy about the absence of these
glyphs in the Unicode Standard, but yesterday I traced the source of my
unease:

No. 3 above occurs in Alcaeus, fr. 129 Voigt, l. 13 in the name
"Urraon". Instances of capital letters 1, 2 and 4 may not be attested
in print AFAIK, but there is nothing to suggest that some new papyrus
finds may not make the use of these glyphs necessary in the future.
Even if no new finds come to light: one may want to code the Aeolic
preposition "Upa" (Attic "Hupo") with a capital initial, for instance
(1). Or "Us" "swine" (Attic "Hus") (4). Only (2) will be extremely
rare, I guess; at least I can't think of an example right now.

Am I right in thinking that this merits writing up a proposal to add
these glyphs to the Unicode standard? I am most interested to hear the
thoughts of the wise on this list. And if the answer is "Yes", I would
appreciate some help in filling out the proposal form from someone
experienced in these matters (I did check the examples available on the
'Net, but I feel a bit uncomfortable going "solo").

Greetings from Leiden,

Pim Rietbroek

W.P.J. Rietbroek Telephone: +31-71-522-1510
Houtmarkt 29 Email: pimr@euronet.nl
2312 PZ Leiden Office: Brill Academic Publishers
The Netherlands Office email: rietbroek@brill.nl
Home Page at http://www.euronet.nl/~pimr/



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