From: André Szabolcs Szelp (a.sz.szelp@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Nov 17 2010 - 10:18:19 CST
AFAIR the reservations of WG2 concerning the encoding of Jangalif
Latin Ь/ь as a new character were not in view of Cyrillic Ь/ь, but
rather in view of its potential identity with the tone sign mentioned
by you as well. It is a Latin letter adapted from the Cyrillic soft
sign, like the Jangalif character. Function, as you point out, is not
a distinctive feature. The different serif style which you pointed out
cannot be seen as discriminating features of character identity,
especially not in a time of bad typography (and actually lack of latin
typographic tradition in China of the time).
/Sz
On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Karl Pentzlin <karl-pentzlin@acssoft.de> wrote:
> As shown in N3916: http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3916.pdf
> = L2/10-356, there exists a Latin letter which resembles the Cyrillic
> soft sign Ь/ь (U+042C/U+044C). This letter is part of the Jaꞑalif
> variant of the alphabet, which was used for several languages in the
> former Soviet Union (e.g. Tatar), and was developed in parallel to the
> alphabet nowadays in use for Turk and Azerbaijan, see:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janalif .
> In fact, it was proposed on this base, being the only Jaꞑalif letter
> missing so far, since the ꞑ (occurring in the alphabet name itself)
> was introduced with Unicode 6.0.
>
> The letter is no soft sign; it is the exact Tatar equivalent of the
> Turkish dotless i, thus it has a similar use as the Cyrillic yeru
> Ы/ы (U+042B/U+044B).
>
> In this function, it is a part of the adaptation of the Latin alphabet
> for a lot of non-Russian languages in the Soviet Union in the 1920s,
> see e.g.: Юшманов, Н. В.: Определитель Языков. Москва/Ленинград 1941,
> http://fotki.yandex.ru/users/ievlampiev/view/155697?page=3 .
> (A proposal regarding this subject is expected for 2011.)
>
> Thus, it shares with the Cyrillic soft sign its form and partly the
> geographical area of its use, but in no case its meaning. Similar can
> be said e.g. for P/p (U+0050/U+0070, Latin letter P) and Р/р
> (U+0420/U+0440, Cyrillic letter ER).
>
> According to the pre-preliminary minutes of UTC #125 (L2/10-415),
> the UTC has not accepted the Latin Ь/ь.
>
> It is an established practice for the European alphabetic scripts to
> encode a new letter only if it has a different shape (in at least one
> of the capital and small forms) regarding to all already encoded
> letter of the same script. The Y/y is well known to denote completely
> different pronunciations, used as consonant as well as vocal, even within
> the same language. Thus, if somebody unearths a Latin letter E/e in some
> obscure minority language which has no E-like vocal, to denote a M-like
> sound and in fact to be collated after the M in the local alphabet, this
> will probably not lead to a new encoding.
>
> But, Latin and Cyrillic are different scripts (the question in the "Re"
> of this mail is rhetorical, of course).
>
> Admittedly, there also is a precedence for using Cyrillic letters in
> Latin text: the use of U+0417/U+0437 and U+0427/U+0447 for tone
> letters in Zhuang. However, the orthography using them was
> short-lived, being superseded by another Latin orthography which uses
> genuine Latin letters as tone marks (J/j and X/x, in this case).
>
> On the other hand, Jaꞑalif and the other Latin alphabets which use Ь/ь
> did not lose the Ь/ь by an improvement of the orthography, but were
> completely deprecated by an ukase of Stalin. Thus, they continue to be
> "the" Latin alphabets of the respective languages.
> Whether formally requesting a revival or not, they are regarded as valid
> by the members of the cultural group (even if only to access their cultural
> inheritance).
> Especially, it cannot be excluded that persons want to create Latin domain
> names or e-mail addresses without being accused for script mixing.
>
> Taking this into account, not mentioning the technical problems
> regarding collation etc. and the typographical issues when it comes to
> subtle differences between Latin and Cyrillic in high quality
> typography, it is really hard to understand why the UTC refuses to encode
> the Latin Ь/ь.
>
> A quick glance at the Юшманов table mentioned above proves that there
> is absolutely no request to "duplicate the whole Cyrillic alphabet in
> Latin", as someone may have feared.
>
> - Karl Pentzlin
>
>
>
-- Szelp, André Szabolcs +43 (650) 79 22 400
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