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Re: Latin mxedruli, or do we really need capital and small letters?

From:Danny Wier <dawiertx@...>
Date:Thursday, May 27, 2004, 1:53
From: <jcowan@...>

> The mtavruli titling style of Mkhedruli (Figure 4) is not case; > it is a style analogous to small caps or bold or italic. In > this style, the distinction between letters with ascenders and > descenders is not maintained, but all letters appear with an > equal height standing on the baseline. Mtavruli-style letters are > never used as 'capitals'; a word is always entirely presented > in mtavruli or not. Mtavruli-style is used in titles, newspaper > headlines, and other kinds of headings. It might be suggested that > non-plain text SMALL CAPS coding be used to represent Mkhedruli > in mtavruli-style. (There is no other such small caps category > that could be applied to Mkhedruli.)
I've also seen _mxedruli_ with wider spacing used in similar fashion to italics -- apparently Georgian has no equivalent of italic script, so it uses _mtavruli_ or the spaced-out _mxedruli_. The old _xutsuri_ (ecclesiastical) capitals, called _asomatvruli_, have been used as capital letters by some poets, can't think of any names right off hand, but that's not normal practice at all.
> The next version of Unicode will feature a full separation of
ecclesiastical
> Georgian (with codes for the upper-case and lower-case letters) from
mxedruli.
> Currently mxedruli and lower-case ecclesiastical forms are unified; this
is
> now considered to have been an error.
A dumb mistake; the ecclesiastical lowercase letters, _nusxuri_, do not look much like _mxedruli_. Unicode screwed up with Coptic too, unifying it with Greek. They got to resolve that issue with 5.0 or whatever the next major revision is. Unifying Coptic with Greek makes only slightly more sense then unifying Cyrillic or Gothic with Greek, or Latin with Greek or Phoenician for that matter!

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John Cowan <cowan@...>