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

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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