The Unicode Standard, Version 5.0--Electronic Edition

Electronic Edition This file is part of the electronic edition of The Unicode Standard, Version 5.0, provided for online access, content searching, and accessibility. It may not be printed. Bookmarks linking to specific chapters or sections of the whole Unicode Standard are available at http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.0.0/bookmarks.html Purchasing the Book For convenient access to the full text of the standard as a useful reference book, we recommend purchasing the printed version. The book is available from the Unicode Consortium, the publisher, and booksellers. Purchase of the standard in book format contributes to the ongoing work of the Uni- code Consortium. Details about the book publication and ordering information may be found at http://www.unicode.org/book/aboutbook.html Joining Unicode You or your organization may benefit by joining the Unicode Consortium: for more information, see Joining the Unicode Consortium at http://www.unicode.org/consortium/join.html This PDF file is an excerpt from The Unicode Standard, Version 5.0, issued by the Unicode Consortiu- mand published by Addison-Wesley. The material has been modified slightly for this electronic edi- ton, however, the PDF files have not been modified to reflect the corrections found on the Updates and Errata page (http://www.unicode.org/errata/). For information on more recent versions of the standard, see http://www.unicode.org/versions/enumeratedversions.html. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and the publisher was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed with initial capital letters or in all capitals. The Unicode® Consortium is a registered trademark, and Unicode™ is a trademark of Unicode, Inc. The Unicode logo is a trademark of Unicode, Inc., and may be registered in some jurisdictions. The authors and publisher have taken care in the preparation of this book, but make no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of the use of the information or programs contained herein. The Unicode Character Database and other files are provided as-is by Unicode®, Inc. No claims are made as to fitness for any particular purpose. No warranties of any kind are expressed or implied. The recipient agrees to determine applicability of information provided. Dai Kan-Wa Jiten, used as the source of reference Kanji codes, was written by Tetsuji Morohashi and published by Taishukan Shoten. Cover and CD-ROM label design: Steve Mehallo, www.mehallo.com The publisher offers excellent discounts on this book when ordered in quantity for bulk purchases or special sales, which may include electronic versions and/or custom covers and content particular to your business, training goals, marketing focus, and branding interests. For more information, please contact U.S. Corporate and Government Sales, (800) 382-3419, [email protected]. For sales outside the United States please contact International Sales, [email protected] Visit us on the Web: www.awprofessional.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Unicode Standard / the Unicode Consortium ; edited by Julie D. Allen ... [et al.]. — Version 5.0. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-321-48091-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Unicode (Computer character set) I. Allen, Julie D. II. Unicode Consortium. QA268.U545 2007 005.7'22—dc22 2006023526 Copyright © 1991–2007 Unicode, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This publication is protected by copyright, and permission must be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. For information regarding permissions, write to Pearson Edu- cation, Inc., Rights and Contracts Department, 75 Arlington Street, Suite 300, Boston, MA 02116. Fax: (617) 848-7047 ISBN 0-321-48091-0 Text printed in the United States on recycled paper at Courier in Westford, Massachusetts. First printing, October 2006 Chapter 7 European Alphabetic Scripts 7 Modern European alphabetic scripts are derived from or influenced by the Greek script, which itself was an adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. A Greek innovation was writing the letters from left to right, which is the writing direction for all the scripts derived from or inspired by Greek. The European alphabetic scripts and additional characters described in this chapter are Latin Cyrillic Georgian Greek Glagolitic Modifier letters Coptic Armenian Combining marks The European scripts are all written from left to right. Many have separate lowercase and uppercase forms of the alphabet. Spaces are used to separate words. Accents and diacritical marks are used to indicate phonetic features and to extend the use of base scripts to additional languages. Some of these modification marks have evolved into small free-standing signs that can be treated as characters in their own right. The Latin script is used to write or transliterate texts in a wide variety of languages. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an extension of the Latin alphabet, enabling it to represent the phonetics of all languages. Other Latin phonetic extensions are used for the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet. The Latin alphabet is derived from the alphabet used by the Etruscans, who had adopted a Western variant of the classical Greek alphabet (Section 14.2, Old Italic). Originally it contained only 24 capital letters. The modern Latin alphabet as it is found in the Basic Latin block owes its appearance to innovations of scribes during the Middle Ages and practices of the early Renaissance printers. The Cyrillic script was developed in the ninth century and is also based on Greek. Like Latin, Cyrillic is used to write or transliterate texts in many languages. The Georgian and Armenian scripts were devised in the fifth century and are influenced by Greek. Modern Georgian does not have separate uppercase and lowercase forms. The Coptic script was the last stage in the development of Egyptian writing. It represented the adaptation of the Greek alphabet to writing Egyptian, with the retention of forms from Demotic for sounds not adequately represented by Greek letters. Although primarily used The Unicode Standard 5.0 – Electronic edition Copyright © 1991–2007 Unicode, Inc. 226 European Alphabetic Scripts in Egypt from the fourth to the tenth century, it is described in this chapter because of its close relationship to the Greek script. Glagolitic is an early Slavic script related in some ways to both the Greek and the Cyrillic scripts. It was widely used in the Balkans but gradually died out, surviving the longest in Croatia. Like Coptic, however, it still has some modern use in liturgical contexts. This chapter also describes modifier letters and combining marks used with the Latin script and other scripts. The block descriptions for other archaic European alphabetic scripts, such as Gothic, Ogham, Old Italic, and Runic, can be found in Chapter 14, Archaic Scripts. 7.1 Latin The Latin script was derived from the Greek script. Today it is used to write a wide variety of languages all over the world. In the process of adapting it to other languages, numerous extensions have been devised. The most common is the addition of diacritical marks. Fur- thermore, the creation of digraphs, inverse or reverse forms, and outright new characters have all been used to extend the Latin script. The Latin script is written in linear sequence from left to right. Spaces are used to separate words and provide the primary line breaking opportunities. Hyphens are used where lines are broken in the middle of a word. (For more information, see Unicode Standard Annex #14, “Line Breaking Properties.”) Latin letters come in uppercase and lowercase pairs. Languages. Some indication of language or other usage is given for many characters within the names lists accompanying the character charts. Diacritical Marks. Speakers of different languages treat the addition of a diacritical mark to a base letter differently. In some languages, the combination is treated as a letter in the alphabet for the language. In others, such as English, the same words can often be spelled with and without the diacritical mark without implying any difference. Most languages that use the Latin script treat letters with diacritical marks as variations of the base letter, but do not accord the combination the full status of an independent letter in the alphabet. Widely used accented character combinations are provided as single characters to accom- modate interoperation with pervasive practice in legacy encodings. Combining diacritical marks can express these and all other accented letters as combining character sequences. In the Unicode Standard, all diacritical marks are encoded in sequence after the base characters to which they apply. For more details, see the subsection “Combining Diacritical Marks” in Section 7.9, Combining Marks, and also Section 2.11, Combining Characters. Alternative Glyphs. Some characters have alternative representations, although they have a common semantic. In such cases, a preferred glyph is chosen to represent the character in the code charts, even though it may not be the form used under all circumstances. Some Copyright © 1991-2007, Unicode, Inc. The Unicode Standard 5.0 – Electronic edition 7.1 Latin 227 Latin examples to illustrate this point are provided in Figure 7-1 and discussed in the text that follows. Figure 7-1. Alternative Glyphs in Latin a a g g @ A U S T W V " C D, L R Common typographical variations of basic Latin letters include the open- and closed-loop forms of the lowercase letters “a” and “g”, as shown in the first example in Figure 7-1.

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