Re: Vowels in Finlaesk

taliesin the storyteller wrote:
> * T. A. McLeay said on 2007-09-04 08:01:44 +0200
>> Philip Newton wrote:
>>> What's ue-ligature's Unicode codepoint? I can't remember
>>> coming across that one.
>> LATIN SMALL LETTER UE U+1D6B (in Phonetic Extensions, down the
>> back), it has no capital counterpart.
>>
>> I'm not sure what use it has that it's been included in
>> Unicode.
>
> In the beginning, unicode included all symbols that occurred in
> already existing charsets. Lately there's been a rush to add
> symbols that have never had a charset, like for instance every
> single hanji-character that has ever existed, cuneiform,
> phaistos disk...
>
> So: if {ue} was included early, it doesn't need to be useful in
> any way, it's just there to ensure that you can convert between
> unicode and older charsets without ambiguity. If it is a late
> inclusion it is quite likely that it was used in medieval
> manuscripts, as plenty of variants and scribe's abbreviations
> are making it in now.
It was included late, and it's included in Phonetic Extensions, which
AFAIK includes only characters primarily used in non-IPA 20th century
phonetic notations (e.g. many are from the Uralic alphabet, some
(slashed th) are used by English dictionaries. I have looked and not
found the source of the character, but perhaps I am not looking hard
enough. (When I created the Føtisk alphabet, I don't think I was aware
that it was included in Unicode. It may not have been: It might have
been included in 4.1 (a large number of phonetic symbols were added at
that stage), and I might have started Føtisk before 2005.)

--
Tristan.