RE: Comma below, cedilla, and Gagauz

[Robert]

--- On Thu 09/26, Michael Everson < [EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote:
From: Michael Everson [mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 16:08:09 +0300
Subject: Comma below, cedilla, and Gagauz

> Wonder of wonders, as predicted, the question of what Gagauz users
> prefer for their language has arisen.
>
> Currently I am giving some lectures on Unicode and related subjects
> at a European Summer School (Electronic Publishing for Cultural
> Heritage Studies) in Bulgaria. Among the participants is Miglena
> Ivanova, a native-speaker of "Bulgarian Turkish", or Gagauz.
> (Gagauz
> is about as different from Turkish as Bulgarian is from Serbian.)
>
> Interestingly, in Miglena's work she has identified a few elements of
> Trubetzkoy's transcription system which are absent from the Unicode
> standard. We will be looking into this in more detail in due course.
>
> Naturally I asked Miglena about the preference Gagauzi have for
> writing their language. We looked at a number of publications; one of
> the most interesting displayed a Turkic c-cedilla, a Romanian
> t-comma-below, and then an s whose glyph was more or less a
> compromise between the two. I'm told that a team of researchers in
> Moldova worked on this issue including development of a font.
>
> We will be pursuing this question with specialists in Gagauz to
> determine what the appropriate encoding (s-cedilla or s-comma-below)
> is for their language.
>
--Reply--
The proper encoding of those letters is with *cedilla* (yup�the French kind. . .); thus, c-cedilla, g-cedilla, s-cedilla, t-cedilla, and so on!

Robert Lloyd Wheelock
Augusta, ME USA

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