0027, 02BC, 2019, or a new character?

[Philippe Verdy via Unicode]

But there's NO standard keyboard in Kazakhstan with the Latin alphabet.
Those you'll find are cyrillic keyboards with a way to type basic Latin. Or
keyboards made for other countries.

So this is not a good reason at all. In fact Kazakstan would have to create
a keyboard standard for the Latin orthography, and there's no reason to not
place diacritics or precombined common letters in their new alphabet.
For now it looks they just decided to do nothing at all, meaning that
people will use various foreign Latin layouts, and to be cost effective,
they'll look at those keyboards already used in nearby countries using
Latin orthographies (Romania, Moldavia, Poland, Turkey).

I can understand they don't want the technical trick and difficulties of
dotted vs undotted I used in Turkish, but a single diacritic would have
solved it (and it is part of their solution which uses an apostrophe but
could as well have been an acute), a diacritic which is present in
precombined letters on many European keyboards).

In my opinion they should still have based a Kazakh keyboard that uses the
same location as existing Cyrillic letters, it would have sommethed the
transition. Now typing separate apostrophes in Latin Kazakh will just slow
down the input and strain a single finger too frequently to the same small
key on the top keys row... People won't like it at all... they'll stick on
using the Cyrillic keyboards, and only an IME will convert what they type
to transliterate it to Latin: if ther's an IME, the fact it will be using
apostrophes or diacritics will be equivalent (but corrections of text in
Kazakh will be less problematic for what is really perceived as a single
letter but now being two separate characters (press ony one key, generate
two base characters, but need to press backspace twice for correction, and
added complication when selecting text because now you have separate
grapheme clusters and the apostrophe can play different roles as a modifier
where it should form a cluster, or as an elision mark where it is a
placeholder for separate letters, or as a separate punctuation sign for
quotation...)


2018-01-20 21:04 GMT+01:00 Simon Montagu via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>:

> On 19/01/18 15:37, Philippe Verdy via Unicode wrote:
> > May be the IDN could accept a new combining diacritic (sort of
> > right-side acute accent). After all the Kazakh intent is not to define a
> > new separate character but a modification of base letter to create a
> > single letter in their alphabet.
>
> Hardly. If they insist on using a modifier character available on
> "standard" keyboards instead of already-encoded letters and/or
> diacritics, they are unlikely to be interested in new characters.
>
>
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