Contrastive use of kratka and breve

[Richard Wordingham]

On Wed, 2 Jul 2014 11:48:06 -0700
Leo Broukhis <leob at mailcom.com> wrote:

> If the font happens to have lunar breve at U+0306, whereas the letter
> й has the rounded bowl breve, using CGJ should guarantee to achieve
> distinctive rendering, because <и, CGJ, U+0306> is not canonically
> equivalent to  <и, U+0306> (cf. "The sequences <a, umlaut> and <a,
> CGJ, umlaut> are not canonically equivalent.") and therefore the
> renderer must not be allowed to pick the glyph for й instead as its
> canonical composition. This is a hack, but a legal hack.

And this may be the way to go, because we cannot change the canonical
decompositions of U+0439 CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SHORT I into <U+0418,
U+0306> or of U+045E CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SHORT U into <U+0443,
U+0306>.  Unfortunately, it is the mark that is part of U+0439 that
seems to have been miscoded.  Note also that the contrast is found in
dictionaries, not in ordinary writing.

In Russian the semivowel is called и краткое while the shortened vowel
may be referred to as краткий и, so calling this 'kratka v. breve' is
not very helpful.  Tapani Salminen put up some contrasting usages (in
both Tundra and Forest Nenets) at
http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/cyrillic_breve.html .

Richard.