David Starner wrote on 03/27/2003 12:54:18 AM: > I've found these characters in a book called "The Annals of the > Cakchiquels", by Daniel G. Brinton.
Thanks for this sample. I have seen the cuatrillo in some (relatively) recent linguistics publications. Unfortunately, it was not explained in the one source I have actually collected (I haven't actively gone looking for it yet, but just happened upon it while looking for other things -- IJAL vol. 65, p. 456) so I appreciate the info. > Are these still in use anywhere? Are they > appropriate suspects for Unicode? There still appears to be *some* use of the cuatrillo, though not a huge amount. I'm inclined to think it's a candidate for encoding, and I've already considered proposing it. I have not seen the others in use, though. If the cuatrillo were encoded, the two variants could be represented using existing combining marks and modifier letters. For modern use, perhaps the tz could be represented just as such, "tz", perhaps rendered with a ligature. Perhaps, though, it could be argued that this should be encoded as a distinct (non-decomposible) digraph character, comparable to U+02AB LATIN SMALL LETTER LZ DIGRAPH. One might represent the tresillo as U+025B LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN E or its uppercase counterpart U+0190, though that's probably not a good choice as the tresillo is caseless. So, it should be encoded as a distinct, if it's to be encoded. So, perhaps two letters, LATIN LETTER TRESILLO and LATIN SMALL LETTER TZ DIGRAPH, are candidates for encoding, but only if there's a user need, and I'm not aware of any. Perhaps there are historiographers of Mayan linguistics that want to encode historic texts, or perhaps some Mayanists that, on occasion, want to be able to quote from these historic texts. - Peter --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Constable Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA Tel: +1 972 708 7485
