Kildin alphabet
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Jennifer, Sun, 2022-08-14 11:41
Regarding:
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ISO 639-3:
sjdKildin Saami uses the Cyrillic alphabet but it includes a number of additional/modified non-Slavic letters such as а̄ ӓ ǟ е̄ ё̄ ӣ о̄ ӯ э̄ ю̄ я̄ ӆ ӎ ӊ һ ӈ ҏ to indicate vowel length, palatalization and other features of the language. Some of these letters, such as Ӎӎ, Ӊӊ, and Ҏҏ, are not found in any other language's writing system, and others, such as Ǟǟ, are used in other langauges that use Latin alphabets but not found in other Cyrillic-based alphabets.
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Comments
Dear Jennifer,
Thank you for the information about the non-Cyrillic letters in the Cyrillic used by Kildin Saami [sjd] in the Russian Federation.
I will check with the Ethnologue Scripts Editor whether or not we need to add a note or comment for this.
Best wishes,
Chuck Fennig
Managing Editor, Ethnologue
I would say this is still using the Cyrillic script. You've listed that it uses U+01DE and U+01DF. I don't believe those are the correct codepoints. I would suggest that U+04D2 and U+04D3 plus macron above (U+0304) would be the appropriate codepoints. That's how you've handled ё̄ (U+0451 plus U+0304). The issue is that the decomposition for U+01DF is to Latin characters: U+00E4 U+0304. All the other characters you've listed are in the Cyrillic script. Sometimes in the past we called it the Cyrillic extended script, but really they are all in what Unicode considers the Cyrillic script. It would be an extended Russian alphabet, but it's simply Cyrillic as far ISO 15924 (https://www.unicode.org/iso15924/iso15924-codes.html) defines it and that's how we use the codes.
I don't disagree with anything written above. It has letters unique to Kildin Cyrillic, it's not that they are not Cyrillic. (I called them "additional/modified" and "non-Slavic" letters above, not "non-Cyrillic".) Looking at entries for languages that have similarly modified/extended alphabets, I see that this is usually not indicated in the script section, so it probably should not be mentioned here either. When I made my original suggestion I hadn't realized that. Sorry for any confusion.
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