On 4 Dec 2000, at 12:23, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote:
Also, making the simplification Russian eq Cyrillic is not right.
There are I think dozens of nations/languages, ethnic groups, etc,
using Cyrillic.
Quite so. And "Cyrillic" ne "those Cyrillic letters used in Russian"; it's
even more than those in such collections as WGL4 (which includes
such things as Byelorussian U-breve, Macedonian K-acute, Ukrainian
G-with-upturn, and Serbian lj and nj) -- the standard work (AFAIK),
Musaev's "Alfavity yazykov narodov SSSR" lists alphabets for quite a
few languages spoken on the former USSR, with such letters as T-TS
ligature, ZH-diaeresis, shwa, h, and "Abkhazian h" which looks like a
cursive Danish ae-ligature. (I'm not an expert, but some of the letters
Musaev mentions appear not to be in Unicode, unless you consider
them glyph variants of other latters; for example, he appears to
distinguish between GHE-with-complete-stroke and GHE-with-right-
half-stroke, while the Unicode book only has a glyph GHE-with-
complete-stroke.
I'm slowly copying Musaev's book for my private reference; at the
moment, it's in Word97 format using Unicode, using the Code2000
font for the more exotic characters.
The point being (for the p5p list), I suppose, is that even if you have
a "perfect", language-independent way of transliterating Cyrillic, if
your scheme just does the "major" Cyrillic-using languages (say,
Russian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, Macedonian, and Serbian), then it's
not complete. It also needs to do Bashkir, Azerbaidjani, Khanti, &c.
Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <pnewton(_at_)gmx(_dot_)de>
