Eric,
U+04A6/U+04A7 *is* the Abkhazian character, this has been stated since Unicode 1.0.
I'm not going to stipulate that those giant hooks ARE descenders. We have seen examples where hook and descender are distinct.
The glyph form of these hooks/descenders has always shown great variability as Peter says. In Soviet-era books available when this was first encoded, Cyrillic extensions were often handwritten in, and handwritten forms do not necessarily reflect typography. And the typographical preference may have changed since then, it will be interesting to see what recent samples folks can come up with.
I will look into the Abkhaz data I have in due course. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
