Katakana Extended-A?
Benjamin M Scarborough <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.text.unicode.devel |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
I've come across a number of characters used for kana that are not currently supported by Unicode and may need to be added. http://jdlib.ntl.gov.tw/cgi-bin/browse.cgi?bookid=bjn00172v01 This is a Taiwanese-Japanese dictionary published during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, placed online by the National Taichung Library. Briefly looking through the dictionary shows katakana with a number of extensions used for pronunciation of Taiwanese words. I randomly selected page 874 towards the bottom and found it to be a very good example. First are the tone marks. Out of the thirteen tone marks used in the dictionary, ten are clearly visible on this page. The syllables consist of two or three katakana characters with a tone mark centered over the syllable. Unmarked syllables are tone 1. Also visible on this particular page, on the top section, fourth column from the left, is a yet-unencoded KATAKANA LETTER SMALL WO. Compare to the fullsized WO directly to the left. Lastly, there are two combining marks visible on individual characters: a combining line above and a combining dot below. These could be unified with U+0305 COMBINING OVERLINE and U+0323 COMBINING DOT BELOW respectively. http://www.geocities.jp/itikun01/hibi/zat2.html At the above site is evidence of KATANAKA LETTER YI, KATAKANA LETTER YE, KATAKANA LETTER WU, HIRAGANA LETTER YI, and HIRAGANA LETTER YE. They apparently were introduced in the Meiji era but never entered common usage. However, I have not been able to find instances of any of these five characters in use. If any of these characters are indeed potential additions to Unicode, I propose making a new Katakana Extended-A block at U+AAE0..U+AAFF.