[XeTeX] An (almost) complete cyrunicode.tex

[Nikola Lecic]

On Sat, 30 Jun 2007 02:49:27 +0400
Alexej Kryukov <anagnost at yandex.ru> wrote:

> On Saturday 30 June 2007 01:18, Nikola Lecic wrote:
> >
> > Although this is technically irrelevant (since this list works in
> > XeTeX), I'd propose the following modified classification as more
> > clear for someone who wants to eventually complete it in order to
> > cover Unicode Cyrillic in its entirety:
> 
> Well, I agree that Serbian/Macedonian letters should have not been
> mixed with non-Slavic characters, but your list causes even more
> objections, mainly because most characters you call specifically
> Eastern-Slavic were a part of the original Cyrillic writing system
> as invented by Cyril and Methodius and their followers, and thus
> were sometime well known to all Orthodox Slavs. And even CYRIE, which
> is now considered a specifically Ukrainian letter, had been present
> in Serbian (or Montenegrian) alphabet before Karadzhich' reform
> was adopted! 

Delete "specifical" and put "nowadays in use in ...". The division I
proposed is purely mechanical and could be generated by a computer. "Ы"
is not used in Balkans today, so it is specific for the East Slavic
group _today_; that says nothing about its history. This division's aim
is to easen corrections and checking, not to expose the history of
Cyrillic.
 
> So I think it would be better to divide all Cyrillic characters 
> into the folowing groups:
> 
> - Russian letters;
> 
> - Slavic (Serbian, Macedonian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian) letters
> which are in current use and for this reason available in most
> standard Cyrillic encodings, such as ISO-8859-5 and windows-1251;
> 
> - Historical letters, needed to support the Russian and Bulgarian old
> orthographies;

Only these two?

> - non-Slavic Cyrillic letters.
> 
> There is also a fifth group, namely Old Slavic historical letters, but
> I have not listed it here because those characters are not supported
> in X2, so that it is very unlikely that somebody will use TeX text
> command to access them.
> 
> The reason for placing Russian letters into a separate group is
> purely technical: they occupy a continuous range of codepoints in
> most standard encoding and Unicode, so that it is just convenient to
> put them together. 
 
Well, here I can't see any logic :) Despite your own explanation of
the origin of Cyrillic (which is well known to all us Cyrillic users),
you argue that Russian+Slavic (isn't Russian Slavic?) is the most
accurate division because (modern) Russian character set happened to be
the first in Unicode.

> Of course this doesn't mean that the Russian alphabet actually has
> any priority, so that its letters are considered "basic" while other
> Slavic characters "supplementary".

I think this directly follows from your previous historical and
Unicode-related statements :) Correct me if I'm wrong from the logical
point of view.

And as of this discussion itself... :) Maybe the better solution would
be to have just Slavic/non-Slavic/Historic (out of use) letters.

Nikola Lečić