UNICODE GLAGOLITIC.

Chris Tessone passed on to me the information that version 4.1.0 of the Unicode Standard has been published.

The following complete scripts have been added in Unicode 4.1.0:
* New Tai Lue (U+1980..U+19DF)
* Buginese (U+1A00..U+1A1F)
* Glagolitic (U+2C00..U+2C5F)
* Coptic (U+2C80..U+2CFF)
* Tifinagh (U+2D30..U+2D7F)
* Syloti Nagri (U+A800..U+A82F)
* Old Persian (U+103A0..U+103DF)
* Kharoshthi (U+10A00..U+10A5F)

To celebrate the occasion, R.M.Cleminson, Professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Portsmouth, has prepared a new edition of the Budapest Glagolitic Fragments, fully Unicode-compliant; having downloaded the font he provides, I can now see the Glagolitic in all its weird glory, and if the idea appeals to you, you can do the same.


Here’s a chunk of it, just so I can have the pleasure of seeing it on LH:
ⰰⰴⱏⰻⰽⱁⱍⰾⱁⰲⱑⰽ҃ⱏⱄⰻⱈⱁⱋⰵⱅⱏⱃⰰⰸⱁⱃⰻⱅ
ⰻⰸⰰⰽⱁⱀⱏⰿⰰⱀⰰⱄⱅⱏⰻⱃⱏⱄⰽⰻ:ⰻⰶⰵ
ⱅⱏⰻⱆⱄⱅⰰⰲⰻ჻Ⱃⰵⱍⰵⰶⰵⰻⰳⱆⰿⱏⱀⱏ
ⰽⰰⰽⱁⱈⱁⱋⰵⱅⱏⱃⰰⰸⱁⱃⰻⱅⰻⰸⰰⰽⱁⱀⱏ

Comments

  1. I think I may have to start writing my Russian LJ in Glagolitic. It’s just so cool. 😀

  2. I’m on Mac OS X and the font is behaving strangely. If I look at it in Font Book, it looks kinda Cyrillic, but if I look at what you posted, it looks just strange. The last character on the first line and the first character on the third line look like clip-on sunglasses.

  3. They’re supposed to… I think… that’s U+2C45 GLAGOLITIC SMALL LETTER TVRIDO.
    Unicode Glagolitic character reference chart.
    Omniglot page on Glagolitic
    Here’s a screenshot of Cleminson’s page as it appears in my browser (I’ve turned up the text size a little so it’s clearer).
    It’s not really surprising of some applications have difficulty with these new Unicode scripts. None of my software knows they exist, so it won’t do font substitution (therefore I can see Cleminson’s Glagolitic but not the same text above, since this page doesn’t specify his font). Also some weird stuff happened when I pasted it into a text editor – some of the characters won’t display in the font depending on other characters on the same line.
    This page is #1 on Google for ‘unicode glagolitic’, incidentally.

  4. Some of the Dilyana font appears correctly in Mozilla, but some doesn’t. For instance, the character I cited appears to be rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise from character 2C41 ⱁ; oddly, when I preview this post, the character appears correctly. However, the first character in the first line 2C30 ⰰ appears correctly both in your orignial post and in the preview of this post.
    In Font Book, Dilyana looks like a different style of Cyrillic. For example, the backwards R in Cyrillic appears as a capital A with a descending line running perpendicular to the crossbar from the crossbar down to the baseline.
    We’ll see what happens when OS X 10.4 Tiger comes out. It claims to support Unicode 4.0.

  5. Looking at the font a little more closely, it does have Cyrillic in it as well – no doubt Font Book is showing you this (but not the Glagolitic, because it doesn’t know it exists). Looks like the archaic style sometimes used for Old Church Slavonic texts, not that I know much about it.
    I think 2C45 just looks a lot like a rotated 2C41 in this font – the glyphs in Unicode charts aren’t definitive. Oddly, the capital version of the letter – 2C15 – seems to be missing.

  6. Aha! Yes, decimal 11333 ⱅ = hex 2C45 &#x2C45 and is the character in question. The Unicode PDF squares off the upper left and right curves, which is what threw me off. There is also the matter that the font displays small in my browser, making it harder to match up with the PDF contents.

  7. Yes, it is rather small. I’ve found that fonts for exotic scripts often display poorly at point sizes which are perfectly adequate for Latin.
    Anyway, I got impatient with my character map‘s inability to display the new characters, so last night I downloaded the source, regenerated the necessary tables and recompiled it. Remarkably easy, actually, I can’t imagine why the developer hasn’t done it yet.
    Anyway, here’s a screenshot of the whole Glagolitic range as displayed in the Dilyana font. You can see that a few characters are missing.
    I’ve also got fonts for a couple more of the new ranges. Here’s Tifinagh, in Hapax Berbère, one of two fonts (the other, Hapax Touareg, is also available in a form with mirrored glyphs) available from Patrick Andries (note: site is in French). I understand that this is the font used in the Unicode Tifinagh proposals and charts.
    The Arabic Supplement range, in the latest version of Paktype Tehreer.
    Finally, Old Persian, in James Kass’s font for Plane 1, Code2001. (Its shareware sister font, Code2000, already has a number of the new scripts, including New Tai Lue and Buginese.)

  8. Code2000, already has a number of the new scripts, including New Tai Lue and Buginese.

    Oops, that’s an error, it doesn’t have New Tai Lue. It does have Buginese and Tifinagh, though.

  9. wow! Glagoljica is now in Unicode! how I welcome it as a Slavic language speaker!
    Win XP on this computer, and my browser somehow doesn’t “automagically” recognise it, yet I succeeded to view the text in Word (it did not list the font in the font pull-down menu either, I had to write the font name “Dilyana” manually! but now it works)
    though, I have to admitt… it’s a shame.. I don’t read Glagoljica.. once I attended a course (within the World Esperanto Convention in Zagreb, 4 years ago) but forgot everything; this is a new impulse to re-learn it
    in the course we learnt how to write it too; now I don’t remember much of it (and my notices, if I am able to find it, might be now about 1000 km away from me), just that the “stroke intuition” was completely different of that of Chinese characters (probably because Old Slavic used other writing tools than CJK);
    does anyone know about an online source that explains how to write Glagolitic, ie. how to divide it into the individual strokes?

  10. You can use the translator at http://slavenica.com/ to write in Glagolitic.

  11. Thanks!

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