...Part of the question is whether the reference glyph shapes are correct for Zhuang. They are not correct for the only sample of this orthography which I have seen, which suggests that the Zhuang and old Azeri letters have the same shapes, or very nearly so. If the corrected glyph for Zhuang is correct for Azeri, and the correct Azeri shape is acceptable for Zhuang, then the characters can be unified safely.
I agree 100% with Ken that the Unicode letters Tone Two, Five and Six were introduced to represent the Zhuang tones, and so they should not be hijacked for other uses for which their glyph shapes are not quite appropriate. If the glyph shape for U+0184/U+0185 is wrong for the context that Michael and Peter want to use this character in, then I guess that this is probably not the right character to use for that purpose, and they should propose a new character.
Is there any way we can find out whether the Cyrillic soft sign shape would actually have been acceptable to Zhuang readers? Were some printed texts in fact set with standard Cyrillic glyphs for tone 6, as well as for tones 3 and 4? The example in http://www.worldlanguage.com/Languages/Chuang.htm, the only one I have seen, looks more like it was set with a Cyrillic HARD sign.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
