This is general. characters may initially be encoded with a single case where the demonstrated use for only IPA usage (which is single cased). To get dual cased letters, we need to find examples of use in the orthography of a language where all other letters are dual cased. Well this was tur for the German sharp S but for long it was not demonstrated that the lowercase and uppercase was different.
With Rromany (which has multiple orthographies in multiple scripts), the problem is that there's no formal standard and the rromany communities around countries have adapted their orthography with usages found in other ntational languages. There's no real academy and in fact the language is very fragmented, and its tradition is fact more oral than written There are authors of written texts but each one has adopted a convention more or less based on the standard orthography of another language where they live. So there are variants of the orthography in multiple scripts, at least Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Devanagari (probably also Arabic in North-Eastern India, Pakistan, Iran; many be also Georgian: the rromany people are spread in a very large area from Southern Asia, Central Asia, Western Asia, to Europe and North Africa). The orthographies are more or less adaptations of the phonetics of the oral tradition. For those authors that want to better represent the language phonetics it's natural that they'll want to borrow the IPA theta symbol when chossing the Latin script (and in the Greek-based orthography they'll correctly differentiate the Greek Tau and Theta letters for the same purpose). I wonder which letters they choose to differentiate Tau and Theta in Cyrillic (there'a a sizeable rromany community in Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia...). But in the Latin script, authors have also used digraphs (T vs. TH) since long (just like other European languages, including English or French, even if French does not differentiate the phonetics and the H in TH is in fact completely mute!). There's actually no stable translitterators because there are competing orthographies depending on authors, and no formal agreements between authors and no academic institution which is widely recognized (there are severla local cummunities that may have authored some writing guides, but I don't think these are very strong to be authoritative: the tradition is still strongly oral and what is important is not the way the language is written but how it is pronounced and sung: music and songs is an essential part of the rromany culture, and what unites them across countries, even if there are some religion splits). It's normal for Unicode to accept the existence of Latin orthographies that will use the Theta letter as a normal dual cased letter if we can demonstrate that authors need it and publications were easily made and relatively easy to find. Those publicatiosn are part of our wold cultures and needs to be preserved and correctly represented, even if we don't have any formal academy. It is even more important than encoding many new emojis for fun (that are recent inventions but don't have the same level of historic background). Being able to write all languages even if their historic tradition is oral, is an important and respectable goal, notably when these are living languages with a large speaking community. It's not something new: various native African languages have also adopted IPA symbols in their Latin orthography, and wanted to have dual case. So now we also have dual-cased Latin letters Alpha, Epsilon, Open O... It does not matter if IPA only needs lowercase, but it has become a strong common base used for orthographies of languages with oral traditions, and natural for them to expand the IPA set with capital letters for the Latin script (and another proof that IPA is not a separate script but a subset of the Latin script). 2016-06-13 14:41 GMT+02:00 Frédéric Grosshans <[email protected]> : > Le 12/06/2016 02:20, Doug Ewell a écrit : > >> Marcel Schneider wrote: >> >> While some characters were retained, others were rejected, among which >>> the Latin Theta pair, but no mention is found of this rejection in the >>> Non-Approval Notices. >>> >> >> Lots of characters in proposals are rejected without rising to the level >> of explicit disapproval: "Look, we said NO, and don't ask us again." The >> Non-Approval Notices page starts with an extensive description of the >> difference. >> >> At the same time, note that a few proposals, such as LATIN CAPITAL LETTER >> SHARP S, have risen phoenix-like from the ranks of non-approvaldom to >> become genuine encoded characters. >> > And, if I I remember correctly, to proposal for the Latin letter theta > yet has given example of the current usage of ttheta in latin orthography, > like in Rromani (http://www.rromaniconnect.org/Rromanifonts.html, > http://romani.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/whatis/status/codification.shtml > ). I guess a proposal based on the Rromani orthography, (and with input for > the user community, of course!) would easily be accepted. > > Cheers, > > Frédéric >
