Archaic Maltese characters

[David Starner]

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hx5bpd&seq=11 is a scan of
a 1831 Maltese reader, with an unusual alphabet. Most of it is
encoded, but a few have been missed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_alphabet has an article I'll be
referring to; it shows different 1788 and 1845 alphabets.

Wikipedia says "/w/ was written as ⟨w⟩, ⟨u⟩ or as a modified u (not
present in Unicode)." There's a line for U and apparently U for w, but
the lower-case versions don't have a tail. I couldn't find it in
Unicode.

There's a couple characters that can be combined with existing h's
with hooks and one that can be combined with Cyrillic щ. The mirrored
gamma could be encoded as turned L, but the lowercase forms don't
match.

Wikipedia says "Until the middle of the 19th century, two sounds which
would merge into /ˤː/ were differentiated in Maltese. These were
variously represented as ⟨gh⟩, ⟨ġh⟩, ⟨gh´⟩, ⟨gh˙⟩ and with two letters
not represented in Unicode (they resembled an upside down U). " These
are the most functionally unencoded characters; turned U and turned U
with hook.

I'm not going to push them through, but it seems like fertile ground
for a proposal. We could have saved some time by encoding rotation
operators, but that didn't happen, and there's good reasons for it not
to have happened.

-- 
The standard is written in English . If you have trouble understanding
a particular section, read it again and again and again . . . Sit up
straight. Eat your vegetables. Do not mumble. -- _Pascal_, ISO 7185
(1991)