From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Tue Feb 15 2005 - 06:10:21 CST
On 15/02/2005 11:06, Michael Everson wrote:
> At 18:50 -0500 2005-02-14, Patrick Andries wrote:
>
>> While reviewing confusables between in the Greek/Latin set, I fell on
>> U+03F3 j GREEK LETTER YOT.
>>
>> Does somebody know what this letter is used for ?
>
>
> Yes. Linguistics. [j].
Surely not, or at least only if qualified by the word "Greek". The IPA j
is surely a normal Latin j, although pronounced as in German rather than
as in English.
Greek YOT is a rather different animal, see
http://ptolemy.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/yot.html. As is written there:
> The real reason why the yot is there is to do with Unicode's attitude
> to script mixing, which I discuss elsewhere.
- with a link to
http://ptolemy.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/unicode_mixing.html, which
discusses issues like Kurdish Q and W and mentions Wakhi as another
script mixing language - also Byzantine Greek. (But the page title is
unfortunate although amusing: the Wakhi people are not Kurds.) Well, it
does seem inconsistent that Unicode has accepted yot as a character to
avoid script mixing in Greek phonetics, but allows script mixing in
Latin-based IPA phonetics, as well as in general use in Kurdish and
Wakhi. That doesn't seem very consistent to me.
>
>> Does a capital version of this letter (Ll category) exist ?
>
>
> It isn't encoded, if that is what you are asking. In my view, casing
> scripts should not have orphans like this. The existence of case pairs
> is implied by the casing nature of the script.
But there are non-casing characters in casing scripts, e.g. Cyrillic
palochka, apostrophes etc used as letters in some scripts, and arguably
German sharp S.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/ -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.7 - Release Date: 10/02/2005
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