On 2003.10.23, 23:19, Peter Kirk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:This seems odd to me as koppa was never used in Byzantine Greek, except as a number. Perhaps the Cyrillic koppa was also only a number. It wasn't in regular use up to c.1917 in the way that U+0474 was.
the V-shaped letter is something like the Russian close central vowel
? - might be U+0474 which was used in Russian up to about that time,
Iz^ica, of course! I mean, it may be something else though, but it is
unforgivable that I hadn't remembered that one!
the backwards P is the something like the Russian ? and the English k
- this just might be an alternative form of U+0480 which is in effect
a Cyrillic Q.
Hm, U+0480 is the cyrillic version of koppa -- I'd expect it to appear only in byzantine words, mainly used in Orthodox Church context, just like cyrillic omega (U+0460) and cyrillic psi (U+0470). ...
Of course lower case q always looks like reverse p, and it is not unexpected that this would sometimes find its way into an upper case alphabet.... But since this is the 1909-1926 Abkhaz orthography, we can expect this kind of letters in use more than in Stalin-era orthographies, that's for sure.
Anyway, this may be the specific cyrillic glyph refered in use in Kurdish some time ago, one point in favor of its disunification from U+0051.
However, I remember having sees a late 18th cent. french painting showing U+0051 (latin, not cyrillic!) with the reverse "P" glyph.
I see this now in the larger image. But as for what it is... It might be an apostrophe after the T marking an ejective, as in the IPA version of one of the T's in http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Abkhaz-alphabet. From http://www.abkhazia.org/lang.html: Abkhaz has "the standard Caucasian opposition between voiced vs voiceless aspirate vs voiceless ejective obstruents". Though quite why they would use an ejective in the transliteration of "proletariat", I don't know.I don't see any apostrophe in the images either at http://soviet.lovehinaplus.com/CGEORGIA.HTM or at http://coffeenews.narod.ru/News/Simbol/IM_001.html.
It is between the "T" and "A" of the first word -- I reckon it may be a
grave (on the "A") instead.
Thanks. I have it now - although I am surprised that ")" is legal here.Am I missing something?
http://www.tuvalkin.web.pt/unicode/su-geab.jpg is not found.
Sorry. It should be http://www.tuvalkin.web.pt/unicode/su)geab.jpg
As for U+0417 and U+04E0, it is clear that the current Abkhaz alphabet uses both of these, see http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Abkhaz-alphabet. I would expect that the letter in the seal is U+04E0 or its predecessor as I have never seen an angular shape for U+0417.
See also http://www.gutenberg.eu.org/pub/GUTenberg/publicationsPDF/28-29-berdnikovb.pdf, which incidentally mentions at least two Cyrillic letters not in Unicode (top of p.34), the "title forms" of the l and n with soft sign ligatures.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
