Re: composed characters question and suggestions for quail-cyrillic-*

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

> JL> Instead of the grave accent `, most Cyrillic languages (including Bulgarian,
> JL> Russian, Ukrainian) use the acute accent ' to mark the stressed vowel.
> JL> Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_accent#Stress for more
> JL> information.
>
> Take a look at the Unicode Cyrillic chart.  Only the grave is available
> for ѝ for example.  They all have to be done with combining.
>
> We still need the grave-accented ѝ Ѝ letters, too.  So both ' and ` (or
> something similar) will be needed as prefix keys.

Yes, I agree.  We need both ` and '.  For some letters the grave accent is
part of the Unicode character (Ѝ, Ѐ), for some letters the acute accent
is part of the Unicode character (Ѓ, Ќ), and for vowels the acute accent is
used to mark the primary stress, and the grave accent is used to mark the
secondary stress.

> JL> If combining characters take two lines, then it is a bug.  I remember
> JL> that rendering of combining characters was correct before the Unicode
> JL> merge.  If it was possible to do right before the merge, maybe it will be
> JL> possible to fix this in current code using the same logic?
>
> OK.  Furthermore, I can do
>
>  (insert (compose-chars ?а ?̀))
>
> but if I try the resulting character in quail-define-rules, it's not a
> valid character read sequence, being two characters.  I also can't
> specify the `compose-chars' function call or a string there.  How do I
> specify a combined character in the quail rules?

Maybe something like this should work ("a`" "а̀") ("a'" "а́").

> JL> In Bulgarian it is rare, but in Russian and Ukrainian it is very
> JL> frequently used letter ;-)
>
> Understood, but ' is the most sensible prefix for accents as well.

I think we should use ` and ' as the postfix character, like
latin-postfix vs latin-prefix.

> Can we have `' generate acute accents and ` generate grave?
> That's a decent compromise since accented letters are rarely needed.

Since ` and ' are more important for accented letters, we should
find an alternative key for ь.

> According to
>
> http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%86
>
> "абзац" is a synonym for paragraph in Russian (and comes from German, so
> I learned something new :).  I don't know what's exactly right here, but
> we can certainly accomodate /pa as a paragraph prefix that produces §.
> I would prefer to leave /ab as § as well since (AFAIK) the pilcrow is
> not as common.  Do you agree?

Good, but I wonder if we should provide this kind of mnemonics for all
languages (e.g. "/se" for English since it is the section sign :-)

> The goal is convenience for the users, so I hope we don't build a large
> prefix tree.  Just the limited repertoire here is already hard to
> remember.

I now noticed that I can't type a pair of double quotes in cyrillic-translit
that I often do.  Maybe this rule should use the slash prefix key /""  -> “ ?

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/