2015-10-29 9:29 GMT+01:00 Marcel Schneider <[email protected]>: > On Thu, 15 Oct 2015 15:46:46 -0700, Leo Broukhis <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Along the same lines, should I be able to change my last name > > officially to Ƃpyxᴎc? (NB all letters are codepoints with names > > starting with "LATIN"). > > This request results in using Latin to imitate Cyrillic in a country > where this kind of approach has never been official. >
The glottal stop is used in African countries that have never used any Cyrillic alphabet. That letter is full part of the Latin alphabet but needed for those languages. That Latin glottal stop competes also with a representation in the Arabic script (the letter form however is different). On the opposite, Native Americans HAVE used the Cyrillic script in Alaska and probably as well in North-Western territories in Canada, in a time where native languages started to be alphabetized by missionaries. Today, it is natural that native Americans that have strong cultural and linguistic links with other native people all around the Artic circle (in Alaska, Northern Europe and Northern and Eastern Russia) want to restore their communications even if they live now in different countries that have now other dominant languages. I don't think that the glottal stop is strange in the Latin script. It is also part of the IPA symbols (where is is unicased), but outside IPA, that letter should be dual cased, like other Latin letters. Until recently the lowercase form was not encoded only because the glottal stop was initially encoded for IPA. > In case somebody has missed that: The current thread is about enforcing > *legal* orthography in a country where it is part of *official* languages. > Canadian syllabics is also used and may be this was the reason for opposing the letter. But as soon as Canada wants romanizations, syllables present in Canadian Syllabics should be represented correctly too in Latin. That letter is encoded since long. With enough time the lowercase form will get used too, because it is natural for the Latin script (which initially also unicameral, lowercase letters only appeared during the Middle Age.) > Arguing that this aping Cyrillic be “along the same lines”, is stacking > insult over insult. > Arguing with Cyriliic is a bad view. That letter is Latin, just like other stops (or additional letters such as the schwa or the open O) needed for many minority languages around the world that have been romanized. In all times, the Latin script has been adapted to represent significant differences, with variants of base letters such as overstrikes or combining accents (that were slowly added over time, and only later formalized with stable orthographies. English also used more letters than those used today (e.g. wynn, and thorn still used in Nordic European countries). > Itʼs a true example of the way how jokification can be perverted. > This can only come from someone in an administration that is not really aware of tghe hiostory of languages, cultures and script. That person simply ignores the long evolution of the Latin script, including for English or French used in today's Canadian administration and government. This is an educational problem for that person or lack of training. There are certainly many smart persons in the Canadian adminsitration that could have argued against that limited vision based on modern English and French. > As that has been done in public, it brings the need of a public apology, > particularly with respect to future archive readers. > > This has already been exposed off list, in conformance to List Policies. > However I feel the need to send it “on the record”, so everybody is > reassured that there was more than one single person defending the serious > of the threadʼs subject. >
