Old Cyrillic Yest

QSJN 4 UKR qsjn4ukr at gmail.com
Wed Feb 26 07:30:05 CST 2014


2012/11/12 QSJN 4 UKR <qsjn4ukr at gmail dot com> wrote:

 > Old Cyrillic letter YEST (Є) has two variants: broad (also called
 > Yakornoye Yest) and narrow. They are saved in modern Ukrainian script
 > (only), where U+0404/0454 UKRAINIAN IE is used for the inherited BROAD
 > YEST and the modern, rectangle form of U+0415/0453 IE for the NARROW
 > YEST. Unicode Standard has a remark to use U+0404 for the Old Cyrillic
 > YEST, but it is unclear, how to distinguish the BROAD YEST and the
 > NARROW YEST. Unfortunately some fonts use U+0404/0454 for any YEST and
 > U+0415/0435 for the modern rectangle IE, some old-style fonts use only
 > the old YEST but with codepoint U+0415/0435 and do not use U+0404/0454
 > at all, some use U+0404/0454 for the BROAD YEST and U+0415/0435 for
 > the NARROW YEST...

2012/11/23 Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org>
>How many truly different letters, old and new, are we talking about? On November 12 you >wrote, "UKRAINIAN IE and BROAD YEST is the same letter in fact." It would not make >sense to assign a new BROAD YEST letter if it is really the same as UKRAINIAN IE, and if >existing texts already use UKRAINIAN IE to represent it.
>

Full picture
Meaning - Glyph - Codepoint
Old ChurchSlavonic:
Narrow Yest (regular form) - very narrow halfmoon - 0404/0454 (ambiguous) and
0415/0435 (probably wrong glyph will be rendered) (there are no
certain codepoints)
Broad Yest (special form, initial, plural disambiguator) - broad
halfmoon, identical
to Ukrainian Ie or maybe somehow grater (broking baseline) - 0404/0454
indeed
Modern imitation of Church Slavonic, or really old texts, or texts
where hard to distinct Broad and Narrow Yest:
Ambiguous Yest - identical to Ukrainian Ie or maybe like Narrow Yest
(in old-style font) -
0404/0454 sure
Modern languages:
Ie - rectangle capital / closed rounded small (identical to Latin) - 0415/0435
Ukrainian Ie - identical to ambiguous Yest - 0404/0454

So there are two steps. First. Required. Separate codepoint for Narrow
Yests. It is just impossible to work with ChurchSlavonic texts without
these. Because: wrong glyph is rendered almost always (you must
understand, we cant hope on language detection, cause the text
contains certain the mix, old text with modern translation) - or -
there is no way to show  Broad Yest at all.
Second. Optional. Separate codepoint for Broad Yests. That's only
necessary if one part of text contains the ambiguous Yests (coded as
now, 0404/0454, without changes!) but other part contains the Broad
Yests and the author can/wants to show this feature.

Am i the only man in the world who think that Unicode is poorly
adapted for ChurchSlavonic?




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