From: Alexander Savenkov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > 2004-05-12T03:08:59+03:00 Eric Muller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > According to <www.eki.ee>, there is a currently an effort to convert the > > writing of Tatar from Cyrillic to Latin. > > > 1. Does somebody have more information about that effort? > > Perhaps it's their own effort. > > > Eki lists four characters as needed but missing in Unicode (see > > <http://www.eki.ee/letter/chardata.cgi?lang=tt+Tatar&script=latin>). > > > 2. The case pair for barred o is encoded (U+019F and U+0275), and it > > seems that their confusion comes from less-than-perfect but annotated > > name for U+019F, and from the usage remark "African". Can we > > authoritatively tell them that those two characters are the ones they > > want? Can we add a "Tatar" usage remark to both? > > Is there a need for this? You don't want to tell everyone on the net > about his or her wrong assumptions. There's one sentence in the page > you mentioned that gives a good description of this resource: > > "The conversion from Cyrillic to Latin script is planned within years > 2001-2011." > > This is false. > > > 3. The case pair n with descender is definitely not encoded, and from my > > memory of the discussion of ghe with descender, we would want to encode > > them as separate characters (rather than with combining descenders on > > "n"). Is anybody working on that proposal? > > There's no Latin Tatar script. It's the law. Full stop. > > It's the Institute of Estonian language. I hope they know more about > Estonian than about other languages and Unicode.
They are numerous sites on the web about the change from Cyrillic to Latin for Tatar that is planned for completion by 2011 by the Republic of Tatarstan (a part of the Russian Federation). There is legal wrangling over wether Tatarstan can make the change back to Latin script official for Tatar as it is used there, but no final decision has been reached and there is probably at least several more years of legal shenanigans before it is reached. However, I have not seen any other source for the characters that the Institute of Estonian Language indicates. Every other source indicates using existing Unicode Latin characters and not a new N WITH DESCENDER character. Apparently the proposed new Latin version of Tatar is not the same as the one used 1929-1939, so it may be that the exact Latin letters have yet to be decided upon, or that the Estonian institute got hold of a draft proposal that contained an N with descender character in it. Such a character would preserve a symmetry between the usage of LATIN N and CYRILLIC EN for Tatar in that to go from <n> to <ng> one would use the descender in both scripts, so I can see why such a character would be under consideration by those planning such a change. As for the merits of the proposed change back to Latin, I think it is silly for Tatarstan to make the change and it is silly for the Russian Federation to oppose it.
