AFAIR the reservations of WG2 concerning the encoding of Jangalif Latin Ь/ь as a new character were not in view of Cyrillic Ь/ь, but rather in view of its potential identity with the tone sign mentioned by you as well. It is a Latin letter adapted from the Cyrillic soft sign, like the Jangalif character. Function, as you point out, is not a distinctive feature. The different serif style which you pointed out cannot be seen as discriminating features of character identity, especially not in a time of bad typography (and actually lack of latin typographic tradition in China of the time).
/Sz On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Karl Pentzlin <[email protected]> wrote: > As shown in N3916: http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3916.pdf > = L2/10-356, there exists a Latin letter which resembles the Cyrillic > soft sign Ь/ь (U+042C/U+044C). This letter is part of the Jaꞑalif > variant of the alphabet, which was used for several languages in the > former Soviet Union (e.g. Tatar), and was developed in parallel to the > alphabet nowadays in use for Turk and Azerbaijan, see: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janalif . > In fact, it was proposed on this base, being the only Jaꞑalif letter > missing so far, since the ꞑ (occurring in the alphabet name itself) > was introduced with Unicode 6.0. > > The letter is no soft sign; it is the exact Tatar equivalent of the > Turkish dotless i, thus it has a similar use as the Cyrillic yeru > Ы/ы (U+042B/U+044B). > > In this function, it is a part of the adaptation of the Latin alphabet > for a lot of non-Russian languages in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, > see e.g.: Юшманов, Н. В.: Определитель Языков. Москва/Ленинград 1941, > http://fotki.yandex.ru/users/ievlampiev/view/155697?page=3 . > (A proposal regarding this subject is expected for 2011.) > > Thus, it shares with the Cyrillic soft sign its form and partly the > geographical area of its use, but in no case its meaning. Similar can > be said e.g. for P/p (U+0050/U+0070, Latin letter P) and Р/р > (U+0420/U+0440, Cyrillic letter ER). > > According to the pre-preliminary minutes of UTC #125 (L2/10-415), > the UTC has not accepted the Latin Ь/ь. > > It is an established practice for the European alphabetic scripts to > encode a new letter only if it has a different shape (in at least one > of the capital and small forms) regarding to all already encoded > letter of the same script. The Y/y is well known to denote completely > different pronunciations, used as consonant as well as vocal, even within > the same language. Thus, if somebody unearths a Latin letter E/e in some > obscure minority language which has no E-like vocal, to denote a M-like > sound and in fact to be collated after the M in the local alphabet, this > will probably not lead to a new encoding. > > But, Latin and Cyrillic are different scripts (the question in the "Re" > of this mail is rhetorical, of course). > > Admittedly, there also is a precedence for using Cyrillic letters in > Latin text: the use of U+0417/U+0437 and U+0427/U+0447 for tone > letters in Zhuang. However, the orthography using them was > short-lived, being superseded by another Latin orthography which uses > genuine Latin letters as tone marks (J/j and X/x, in this case). > > On the other hand, Jaꞑalif and the other Latin alphabets which use Ь/ь > did not lose the Ь/ь by an improvement of the orthography, but were > completely deprecated by an ukase of Stalin. Thus, they continue to be > "the" Latin alphabets of the respective languages. > Whether formally requesting a revival or not, they are regarded as valid > by the members of the cultural group (even if only to access their cultural > inheritance). > Especially, it cannot be excluded that persons want to create Latin domain > names or e-mail addresses without being accused for script mixing. > > Taking this into account, not mentioning the technical problems > regarding collation etc. and the typographical issues when it comes to > subtle differences between Latin and Cyrillic in high quality > typography, it is really hard to understand why the UTC refuses to encode > the Latin Ь/ь. > > A quick glance at the Юшманов table mentioned above proves that there > is absolutely no request to "duplicate the whole Cyrillic alphabet in > Latin", as someone may have feared. > > - Karl Pentzlin > > > -- Szelp, André Szabolcs +43 (650) 79 22 400
