On Thu, Jan 7, 2016 at 7:56 AM, suzuki toshiya <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm not a representative of the experts working for the > proposal from Japan NB, but I could explain something. > > 1) "They never took that out?" I'm not sure who you mean > "they" (UTC? JNB?), but it seems that no official document > asking for the response from JNB is submitted in WG2. > If UTC sends something officially, JNB would response > something, I believe.
I meant the JNB. I thought they had removed that character from the later revised proposals that were posted on the UTC document register, but I checked and I had apparently been mistaken. The issue is only raised in passing in a footnote in Mr. Lunde's feedback. > 2) Difference in HENTAIGANA LETTER E-1 and U+1B001. > > U+1B001 is a character designed to note an ancient (and > extinct in modern Japanese language) pronunciation YE. > > When standard kana was defined about 100 years ago, > the pronunciation YE was already merged to E. > Some scholars planned to use a few kana-like characters > to note such pronunciation (to discuss about the ancient > Japanese language pronunciation), and used some hentaigana- > like glyphs for such purpose. As far as I know, there is > no wide consensus that the glyph looking like U+1B001 was > historically used to note YE mainly, when YE and E were > distinctively used in Japanese language. AIUI they simply reused an existing hentaigana to make the distinction, rather than making a new kana that just happened to look exactly like it. > On the other hand, JNB's proposal does not include any > ancient/extinct pronunciation, Their phonetic coverage > is exactly same with modern Japanese language. So, > the glyph looking like U+1B001 is not designed to note > the pronunciation YE. The motivation why JNB proposed > hentaigana would be just because of their shape differences. > > Therefore, U+1B001 and HENTAIGANA E-1 could be said as > differently designed, their designed usages are different. > Please do not think JNB hentaigana experts overlooked > U+1B001 and proposed a duplicated encoding. They ought to > have known it but proposed. It's not unknown for a single character to have more than one pronunciation in different contexts. > However, some WG2 experts suggested to unify them because > of the shape similarity. I'm not sure whether 2 glyphs are > indistinctively similar for hentaigana scholars, but I > accept with that some people are hard to distinguish. > I cannot distinguish some Latin and Greek alphabets when > they are displayed as single isolated character. We're not talking about about different scripts, though. Hentaigana are obsolete hiragana (eliminated from modern written Japanese by a spelling reform) but they are still hiragana. Latin and Greek, on the other hand, are clearly separate but related scripts.
