Attn: Mark E. Shoulson
C/o Magda Danish
Sr Administrative Director
Unicode Inc
<mark @ kli.org>,
<[email protected]>
Appended are 3 threads in reverse chronological order highlighting
Unicode Inc had in the past copied some letters/symbols from Greek
script and then each copied letter/symbol was re-named as Latin
assigning new code-point as opposed to its origin.
In this regard:
(a) Could you reply back with the entire list of letters/symbols that
were copied and re-named.
(b) Did Unicode Inc publish the whole or part of the list of copied
letters/symbols in any scholarly journal of International reputation?
If so could you send the references of such publications.
(c) If Unicode Inc did not publish in any scholarly journal of
international reputation, then what were the scholarly basis that it
used in order to copy and duplicate and subsequently to assign Latin
name?
(d) In this way, in future, how many letters/symbols Unicode Inc
intend to copy and why would it not just use the same code-point
instead of copying from other script(s)?
Thank you in advance for the information.
Tulasi
====================Thread 1, Aug 14, 2011====================
From: Richard Wordingham <[email protected]>
Date: Sun, Aug 14, 2011 at 1:39 PM
Subject: Greek Characters Duplicated as Latin (was: Sanskrit nasalized
L)
To: unicode Unicode Discussion <[email protected]>
On Sat, 6 Aug 2011 17:25:11 -0700
tulasi <[email protected]> wrote:
> - Why did Unicode Inc copies some letters/symbols from Greek-script
> irresponsibly and renamed as Latin-script?
> - Why din't it (Unicode Inc) use same Greek letters/symbols?
U+00B5 MICRO SIGN is an ISO-8859-1 character, and was therefore
included as U+00B5. It normally precedes a Latin-script letter, and
therefore it actually makes sense to treat it as a Latin-script
character, and possibly give it a different shape in these contexts to
the shape of the Greek letter in Greek text.
The glyphs of U+0251 LATIN SMALL LETTER ALPHA are glyphs of U+0061
LATIN SMALL LETTER A - they have been given separate character status
because IPA uses it as a contrasting character, as with U+0261 LATIN
SMALL LETTER SCRIPT G.
U+1E9F LATIN SMALL LETTER DELTA looks to me like a glyph variant of
U+0065 LATIN SMALL LETTER D, but I may be wrong - look up the proposal
if you're really interested.
U+0216 OHM SIGN is similar to U+00B5 MICRO SIGN, except that it is
used
on its own. Whether it should be merged with U+03A9 GREEK CAPITAL
LETTER OMEGA is debatable, but that is what has been done.
The reason for the encoding of the next four letters as Latin
characters is that they have a special role in the IPA. Three of them
have been used in extensions of the Roman alphabets for various
languages, and thereby acquired capital letters.
U+0263 LATIN SMALL LETTER GAMMA is for IPA usage, and tends to have
different glyphs to the Greek letter. When used to extend the Roman
alphabet, its capital is different to the Greek form, so this fact
also
calls for a different lower case letter.
U+025B LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN E has the same explanation as
U+0263.
U+0278 LATIN SMALL LETTER PHI is for IPA usage, and, unlike Greek,
always has an ascender.
There is also the principal of script separation, whereby different
scripts do not share base characters. This has led to some
duplication, e.g U+0269 LATIN SMALL LETTER IOTA, originally for IPA.
Its capital, U+0196 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER IOTA, is not the same as the
Greek capital iota.
I hope this makes things clearer.
Richard.
====================Thread 2, Jul 13, 2010====================
From: Mahesh T. Pai <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 10:43 PM
Subject: Re: Latin Script
To: [email protected]
Tulasi said on Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 03:25:01PM -0700,:
> Can you email the list of Latin letters/symbols that Unicode
discovered?
>
> Can you also email list of letters/symbols that are not Latin but
each
> has LATIN in its name?
>
> Can you email the list of these letters/symbols as well, including
names?
<sarcasm>
+10000^1000000 to that.
Unicode should not keep such information secret.
What do you guys at Unicode think? That such information is a state
secret or what? Huh?
C'mon, out with it!!!!
</sarcasm>
Sigh!! Some people never read replies. They just ask.
--
Mahesh T. Pai || http://[paivakil|fizzard].blogspot.com
Free Software - it is free as in FREEDOM
From: Tulasi <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 3:25 PM
Subject: Re: Latin Script
To: Mark Davis ☕ <[email protected]>
Cc: Unicode Mailing List <[email protected]>, Doug Ewell
<[email protected]>, Edward Cherlin <[email protected]>
Link is working, thanks! I spent some times with no luck on link as
well as unicode.org, because I wanted to find:
The list of Latin letters/symbols that Unicode has discovered.
Here, a letter/symbol with LATIN in its name in Unicode/ISO is a Latin
letter/symbol. And I call a "Latin letter/symbol" discovered by
Unicode if it created the name before ISO in the standard otherwise
discovered by ISO.
Can you email the list of Latin letters/symbols that Unicode
discovered?
Can you also email list of letters/symbols that are not Latin but each
has LATIN in its name?
> The merger between Unicode and ISO 10646 caused a few character names in
> Unicode to be changed to match the 10646 names.
Can you email the list of these letters/symbols as well, including
names?
Thanks,
Tulasi
From: Mark Davis ☕ <[email protected]>
Date: Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 9:37 PM
Subject: Re: Latin Script
To: Tulasi <[email protected]>
Cc: Unicode Mailing List <[email protected]>, Doug Ewell
<[email protected]>, Edward Cherlin <[email protected]>
See the following for the (many) differences between characters with
the Latin script, and those with LATIN in their names.
http://unicode.org/cldr/utility/unicodeset.jsp?a=\p{script:latin}&b=\p{name:/LATIN/}
I'd suggest taking a more focused approach to learning about the
standard, rather than trying relatively scattershot questions to this
list. You might read through at least the first 3 chapters of the
Unicode Standard, plus the Scripts UAX. These are all online for free
at unicode.org.
Mark
From: Doug Ewell <[email protected]>
Date: Sun, 27 Jun 2010 16:09:41 -0600
Subject: Re: Latin Script
To: Unicode Mailing List <[email protected]>
Cc: Tulasi <[email protected]>
"Tulasi" <tulasird at gmail dot com> wrote:
>> U+00AA FEMININE ORDINAL INDICATOR (which does not contain "LATIN") is
>> considered part of the Latin script, while U+271D LATIN CROSS (which
>> does) is considered common to all scripts.
>
> Can you post both symbols please, thanks?
I can point you to http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0080.pdf , which
includes a glyph for U+00AA, and
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2700.pdf , which includes a glyph
for
U+271D. I don't think it's necessary to post these glyphs to the
public
list.
> Trying to know who among ISO and Unicode first created the names' list
> for Latin-script is not an indication of obsession :-')
>
> So among Unicode and ISO/IEC, who first created ISO/IEC 8859-1 &
> ISO/IEC 8859-2 letters/symbols names with each name with LATIN in it?
Most of the characters in the various parts of ISO 8859 were
originally
standardized before Unicode or ISO 10646, so the names were probably
either created by the ISO/IEC subcommittees responsible for those
parts,
or found in earlier standards and adopted as-is.
The merger between Unicode and ISO 10646 caused a few character names
in
Unicode to be changed to match the 10646 names.
--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org
RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 | ietf-languages @ is dot gd slash 2kf0s
====================Thread 3, Jun 11, 2010====================
From: Edward Cherlin <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 4:58 PM
Subject: Re: Latin Script
To: Tulasi <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 02:44, Tulasi <[email protected]> wrote:
> Mark -> http://unicode.org/cldr/utility/list-unicodeset.jsp?a=\p{sc%3DLatn}
>
> I think I have got the answer to my question in above link. Thanks Mark!
I assume that you know that punctuation and Hindu-Arabic numerals came
in much later, and the rest of what is now ASCII, some of ISO-8859-*,
and typographic font repertoires for English, including arithmetic,
typographic, and commercial symbols, much later still. Carolingian
minuscule began as an alternate form of traditional Latin calligraphy.
Combining minuscule and majuscule came in later, quite gradually. The
distinction of upper and lower case could not be made until type cases
became common in print shops in the Renaissance. There are some
subtleties about variant Latin letters used in Math, the Letterlike
Symbols block, single-width and double-width letters, and a few other
places in Unicode.
> Any letter/symbol has LATIN as part of its name should be part of
> present day Latin-script.
Close, but not quite. Consider LATIN SMALL LETTER PHI (ɸ).
> Is there any new letter/symbol added to Latin-script after creation of
> Unicode?
>
> Thanks to all for answering my question, especially Jony has answered
> with classic-definition of Latin-script (Latin-script did not have
> lower-case letters until probably late 8th
> century).
>
> Tulasi
>
>
> From: Mark Davis <[email protected]>
> Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2010 21:26:43 -0700
> Subject: Re: Latin Script
> To: Tulasi <[email protected]>
> Cc: [email protected]
>
> For definitions, there are many references. For Unicode characters, the
> Standard defines a property in http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr24/ and
> http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/Scripts.txt. Here is the current list:
>
> http://unicode.org/cldr/utility/list-unicodeset.jsp?a=\p{sc%3DLatn}
>
> Mark
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 20:39, Tulasi <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Jony -> A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z
> ?
>
> You mean ALL CAPS again like UNICODE :)
>
> Van -> Do you mean historically or pragmatically?
>
> Actually something that will include all letters/symbols now
> considered Latin-script
>
> Otto Stolz -> Not exactly a definition: What the Unicode standard says
> on this issue, is here:
>
> There might be someone who already defined Latin script!
> Europeans have produced lot of scholars.
>
> Tulasi
>
>
> From: Jonathan Rosenne <[email protected]>
> Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2010 22:05:11 +0300
> Subject: RE: Latin Script
> To: [email protected]
>
> How about
>
> A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z
>
> ?
>
> There are also some extensions, see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet for general background.
>
> Jony
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On
> Behalf Of Tulasi
> Sent: Sunday, June 06, 2010 11:27 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Latin Script
>
> How do you define Latin Script?
>
>
> From: [email protected]
> Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2010 12:18:29 -0700
> Subject: Re: Latin Script
> To: [email protected], [email protected]
>
>>From: Tulasi ([email protected])
>>How do you define Latin Script?
>
> Do you mean historically or pragmatically? Historically, it is an
> adaptation of the Ionian Greek (or is it Doric?), via Etruscan, for
> the purpose of writing Latin, and later extended by the addition of
> alternate letterforms (J, W, Þ, and the lower case) and diacritics to
> the use of western European languages and globally to indigenous
> languages in primary contact with western European languages that use
> the Latin alphabet.
>
> Pragmatically, it is the collection of characters that are used in
> languages in conjunction with the primary collection of Roman derived
> letterforms as an alphabetic script. This means that the syllabic
> Fraser Lisu is not Latin script. Neither is Cyrillic, even though it
> has imported Dze and Je - the basic Latin alphabet does not constitute
> the core of Cyrillic usage.
>
> Typographic tradition also plays a part - Greek would probably be a
> lot more ambiguous if it hadn't developed typographically among
> Byzantine scribes. Latin typography developed primarily among
> post-Roman and Carolignian scribal traditions, with offshoot
> blackletter and Italic scribal traditions that have secondary status
> in the modern script. Greek and Cyrillic don't share this history, and
> as such, even though they are structurally similar, they have evolved
> along different lines and constitute distinct scripts. The fact that
> you don't find languages that mix the two up is evidence of these
> schizms. The border languages choose one or the other, or they have
> two different orthographies that use each script independently of the
> other.
>
> Van
>
>
> From: Otto Stolz <[email protected]>
> Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2010 21:50:23 +0200
> Subject: Re: Latin Script
> To: Tulasi <[email protected]>
> Cc: [email protected]
>
> Am 2010-06-06 10:26, schrieb Tulasi:
> How do you define Latin Script?
>
> Not exactly a definition: What the Unicode standard
> says on this issue, is here:
> 7.1 Latin
> <http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.2.0/ch07.pdf#G4321>
>
> And a few words, e. g. “well-known”, are also here:
> 6.1 Writing Systems
> <http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.2.0/ch06.pdf#G7382>
>
>
> Best wishes,
> Otto Stolz
>
>
>
--
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://www.earthtreasury.org/
