Subject: Re: [Ietf-languages] Click letters in ISO 639-3 and Registry (long)

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2018 13:01:36 -0700

Hugh Paterson wrote:

> ISO 15924 is an ISO standard which indicates which unicode values are
> part of a script. A script which is in turn is used by a language.

ISO 15924 identifies scripts, not the characters used to write those
scripts. 

> Do you see a reasonable way to use ISO 15924 correspondences between
> language and the characters used to make the distinction between which
> of the apostrophe like characters is the optimal candidate for use in
> the language name by ISO 639-3?

I know you asked Michael, but:

Unicode does include information about which characters belong to which
scripts, but 0027, 02BC, and 2019 are all categorized as "Common." So no
help there.

Unicode also includes a General Category for each character. 0027 (the
straight ASCII apostrophe) is "Other Punctuation" and 2019 (the right
single quotation mark) is "Final Punctuation," while 02BC is "Modifier
Letter."

Unicode also has notes on these characters (prose) that specifically say
02BC is the right character to use as an orthographic letter, and 2019
is the right character to use as punctuation. Font limitations aren't
supposed to play into character identity decisions.

> Or is this a moot point because we are not writing our language
> names in the scripts that those languages use to write. For instance
> we write 'Thai' not 'ภาษาไทย' as the language name in descriptions. So
> for some language's names we are are not looking for the 'proper'
> character used by the language in the writing of their language name,
> we are looking for the proper character to write their language name
> as it would appear in a 'Latin' typeface script.

These languages do use the Latin script.
 
--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org