cyrillic small letter soft / hard sign: U+044C / U+044A

[suetzjoh]

I would like to request the inclusion of the letters ъ and ь on behalf of the Old Lithuanian Etymological Dictionary project at Humboldt-University Berlin (https://alew.hu-berlin.de). We currently lack a Unicode font that contains all the special characters that are needed for Lithuanian philology, ṡuch as l̃, ę́, ė̃ or ė́. Junicode contains almost all of those characters, except for ъ and ь.

U+044A CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER HARD SIGN U+044C CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SOFT SIGN

In Slavic historical linguistics, reconstructions of words are usually written with latin characters, but the cyrillic letters ъ and ь are used for the Proto-Slavic sounds that historically derive from Proto-Indo-European short /u/ and /i/ respectively. Thus the community of Slavic philology would also greatly benefit from this inclusion.

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Note: I already voiced this request on sourceforge a while back, so this might technically be a duplicate.

[psb1558]

I'll be glad to add these, and will close this when they're done. A question: are there ever diacritics either above or below these letters?

[suetzjoh]

Thank you very much!

Yes, they sometimes have accents. I’ve seen ъ́, ь́, ъ̏, ь̏, ъ̀, ь̀ and I can also imagine ъ̍, ь̍ to be useful.

[psb1558]

Okay. These will have anchors so that you can position any combining marks over them, and they will be positioned correctly.

[ischaap]

I'm really happy to see these added. I think the placement of the grave diacritics could be adjusted a bit though, and I'm also wondering if a more italic shape could be made for the italic glyph. See below with Brill for comparison (v. 1.066 static TTF medium weight in MS Word):

[psb1558]

I'll have a look.

[ischaap]

@psb1558 I wonder if, when you're able to revisit these, you could also add U+042A capital hard sign, U+042C capital soft sign, and small caps and petite caps for both -- would be most appreciated.

[silmeth]

I’ll add that some other diacritics are used too, cf. eg. *gъ̑rdъ in Derksen (also on Wiktionary – though I think it’s a wrong notation for Wiktionary…, see Accents on Wiktionary’s Proto-Slavic page, and I’m not sure why Derksen uses it instead of double grave accent).

[suetzjoh]

@silmeth 'ъr' is a so-called ‘mixed diphthong’ which have the same tonal distinctions as the long monophthongs. Cf. the corresponding (Old) Lithuanian word gurdùs, A.sg. gur̃dų with circumflex as apposed to e.g. kùrti with acute. The notation for the acute can be seen in *pь̀lnъ.

[silmeth]

@suetzjoh ah, that makes sense, thanks! :)

[psb1558]

For comment, here are new italic forms.

I don't have a feel for cyrillic, so feedback would be very welcome.

[psb1558]

This is done. The changes/additions will be in the next release (probably in a week or so).