--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "suzmccarth" <suzmccarth@...> wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
> <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
>
> > What's in the Canadian standard CAN/CSA 2243.4.1? The Unicode
> > Collation Algorithm

(http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr10)

> > Version 4.0 does mention it.
>
> Okay, I am reading these two links carefully.
> >
> > The
> > > Thinking of that, considering that Qalam seems to have a

couple

> of
> > members
> > > with a good working knowledge of Canadian Syllabics and
> languages
> > which use
> > > it, such a collation specification could be a nice

contribution

> > from the
> > > Qalamites to the world...
> >
> > And the current collation codes can be found at
> > http://www.unicode.org/Public/UCA/latest/allkeys.txt . There's
> > nothing sophisticated there for Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics,
> unless
> > you count putting QAI and NGai in the right place. However, do
> the
> > majority of their user communities regard length and

labialisation

> as
> > secondary features?
>
> #1426 and vowel length are definitely secondary. The authors of

the

> Eastern Cree dictionary agreed to remove preaspiration from all
> print text except the dictionary in 1991!

In principle it's very easy to modify the Unicode collation table to
make U+1426 (pre-aspiration) and vowel length sort on, say, the same
basis as accents with the Roman alphabet. However, there are three
issues once you know what you want to achieve:

1) How do you maintain the tables to cope with extra characters
being added to Unicode?
2) Do your applications use such tables? I gather the basic
Microsoft sorting function does not, and was not designed to handle
mixed language strings.
3) How do you persuade the applications to use a custom collation
table, e.g. one appropriate to the current locale?

Do the Inuit agree that length is secondary? As Inuit /ai/ is
written with <e> syllables and Inuit /aai/ is written with modified
<i> syllables, I would not presume that it was secondary. It is not
necessarily a complication, for they *might* treat this difference
as primary but <o> v. <oo>, <a> v. <aa> and <i> v. <ii> as secondary.

> >There may be even more issues with the vowelless
> > consonants (typically syllable final).
>
> Eastern and western finals are font differences! IMO

Didn't I also hear that they were often omitted? That would be like
the early Philippine scripts, which didn't write syllable final
consonants at all.

> >Another issue is that there
> > appear to be fricativisation and affricatisation diacritics.

> Don't know what this is - possibly not Cree.

Compare FI U+1555 with PI U+1431 , and THI U+1560, N-CREE THI U+1561
with TI U+144E. There is an extra loop, with different conventions
for its placement. When FI is used as Inuktitut /vi/, I doubt the
loop is seen as a diacritic.

The clearest affrication diacritics are in Carrier - compare Carrier
DZU U+1648 with Carrier ZU U+1640 and Carrier TSU U+165B with
Carrier SHU U+1654. The diacritic is a tack.

TI is also modified to make TTHI U+156C and TYI U+1571, but I don't
see any other consonants being modified in the same fashion.

Richard.