The usage of Z WITH STROKE

[Ken Whistler]

On 11/25/2016 10:20 PM, Janusz S. Bień wrote:
> Now there is a follow-up question: why the character was included in
> Unicode 1.1.0?

Well, it was included in Unicode 1.1 because it was published in Unicode 
1.0 already. So that is the proximate reason.

That inevitably will raise the question, "Why was it included in Unicode 
1.0?"

Well, the proximate cause for that was the presence of z with stroke in 
the XCCS character set, which was the source for a lot of the early 
Unicode 1.0 repertoire. More precisely:

XCCS (= Xerox Character Code Standard) 1990 contained:

0x23 0x48 Azerbaijani capital letter Z
0x23 0x68 Azerbaijani small letter Z

So that also answers the next question, "Why was it included in XCCS?" 
Note that XCCS 1990 is the 2.0 version. The 1.0 version of XCCS was 
dated 1980. I don't have access to that one, so cannot tell for sure 
whether it contained the "character set 43_8 " content (i.e. the 0x23 .. 
character block) or not.

At any rate, see here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijani_alphabet

The additions from the XCCS "character set 43_8 " included the schwa, 
the gha, and the z-stroke from the old Azerbaijani Latin alphabet, 
documented there as in use from 1929 until 1939. And from XCCS, all of 
them made it into Unicode 1.0.

So that should pretty definitively answer the origin question for z with 
stroke.

> And there are also two other related questions:
>
> 1. Is there an easy way to check whether the character existed already
> in pre-Unicode character sets? I'm aware about a difficult way,
> i.e. browsing International Register of Coded Character Sets to be Used
> with Escape Sequences.

The International Register is *not* a particularly fruitful source. Much 
more of the Unicode 1.0 material actually came from corporate sets, 
including, but not limited to XCCS and the large collection of IBM code 
pages.

>
> 2. Which characters codes were included in the Unicode round-trip test?
> Was the list ever published somewhere? There used to be available the
> files containing mappings from some legacy codes to Unicode, I can't
> find them now. Perhaps the mappings where prepared just for the
> round-trip codes?

Currently maintained mappings (and some historic materials) are posted at:

http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/

For the really old mapping pertinent to the original decisions about 
inclusion in Unicode 1.0, the mapping data for East Asian were 
distributed in a 3.5" floppy diskette on request. Probably very hard to 
locate (or read) one of those now.

But you can refer to the *scanned* version of Chapter 6 of Unicode 1.0, 
which is available online. That was a printed copy of many of the 
cross-mapping tables to external standards. See:

http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode1.0.0/ch06.pdf

For the cross-mapping of the Unicode 1.0, Volume 2 unified CJK, that is 
also scanned and available online:

http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode1.0.0/HanCharts2.pdf

That table is known to have errors in it, so for CJK it should not be 
considered currently definitive in any meaningful way -- it is of 
historic interest.

--Ken

>

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