Armenian East-West Distinctions

Fri Jun 28 21:14:07 CEST 2013

In January, I posted to the Mpeg-OTspec group some communication with Vlad
Levantovsky regarding Armenian East-West distinctions we had been grappling
with for years. For convenience, I include it here along with follow up
conversation and add some information by my domain expert, George Simper as
of today. I hope this will help motivate an additional OpenType language
tag for Armenian West.

Best regards,
John D. Hopkins

Vlad,

…

For many years we have been dealing with distinctions between Armenian East
(used inside Armenia) vs. Armenian West (used outside of Armenia, including
the US). There are many differences between these two forms of the language
and how they affect font glyphs. Our company's linguists say that Microsoft
and Adobe products only use rules corresponding to Armenian West, but our
needs are for Armenian East. So we have built fonts that favor the latter,
which we use in-house for our own publications. But we also have older
publications that are supposed to use the Armenian West. So we really need
both.

There is no distinction between these two variants of Armenian using ISO
639-3 exclusively. Nor are there really any clear distinctions in
OpenType's language tags. In the OpenType Spec, there is a script tag
'armn' and a language tag 'HYE ' for Armenian. There is also the 'dflt'
language tag. We could really use a standard way of handling font glyph
differences between these two variants of Armenian within OpenType. We have
observed that under the 'armn' script tag, that both the 'dflt' and 'HYE '
tags use Armenian West rules in Microsoft and Adobe products. Perhaps an
additional OpenType tag of 'HYE2' or 'HYEE' could be added that would
correspond to Armenian East rules. (Another possibility is to use 'HYE '
for Armenian East and 'HYEW' for Armenian West. It does not really matter
to us, as long there is a clear distinction in the OTSpec).

Again, thank you for your help. We have not known exactly who to turn to,
to resolve these issues, though we have brought them up to both Microsoft
and Adobe in years past, unfortunately without success. Maybe you and this
group can help.

Best regards,
John D. Hopkins

>>>>>>>> I added further:

Note that IANA tags used for BCP-47 language tagging distinguish these two
variants of Armenian:

Type: variant
Subtag: arevela
Description: Eastern Armenian
Added: 2006-09-18
Prefix: hy
%%
Type: variant
Subtag: arevmda
Description: Western Armenian
Added: 2006-09-18
Prefix: hy
%%

(from http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry)

>>>>>>>>> Vlad responded:

Thank you John,****

** **

I think the issues you brought up are important to address but they seem to
require quite a bit of further discussions and work. I doubt that simply
adding new tags would solve it by itself, we also need to understand the
differences between languages and document them properly so that the
companies like Adobe, Microsoft, Monotype (and many independent font
vendors) would know what the problems are and how to solve them, what is
required of implementations, etc. The lack of this understanding is what
may have been hampered the progress on this issue – we definitely need to
continue this discussion to find a solution.****

** **

Thank you,****

Vlad

From: George Simper
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2013 11:22:09 -0600
To: "John D. Hopkins"
Subject: Armenian-East and Armenian-West

John

The majority of the reference materials were provided in 2007 by by Timo
Koponen, our language supervisor in Europe.

*I.                    **Pronunciation differences*

As we saw on the site http://www.omniglot.com/writing/armenian.htm, the
artwork for the two languages is the same, but the pronunciation for the
artwork is different. Mostly changes of voiced (dza, ga) to voiceless (tza,
ka). See the attached PDF for the various changes in pronunciation.

*Recommendation for supporting spelling differences*

With the pronunciation differences,  spellings will be different, requiring
the need for different spell checkers and grammar checkers, unique language
tags for Armenian-East and Armenian-West will be required in 639-3 to
support them.

*II.                  **Ligatures*

The biggest problem with ligatures is one glyph, U+0587 և, which is handled
quite differently depending on which form of Armenian you are working with.
See the tables below.

*Armenian-East*

Unicode

Artwork

Lower Case

0587

և

Upper Case

0535 + 057E

Ե + վ

ALL CAPS

0535 + 054E

Ե + Վ

OpenType rules for casing would require that *0587* be changed to *0535+057E
* for Initial capitals, and *0535+0543* for all capitals or small
capitals.. It would also require that 0535+057E for Initial capitals, and
0535+054E for All caps and small caps be changed to 0587 when moving back
to lower case.

* *

*Armenian-West*

Unicode

Artwork

Lower Case

0587

և

Upper Case

0535 + 0582

Ե + ւ

ALL CAPS

0535 + 0542

Ե + Ղ

OpenType rules for casing would require that *0587* be changed to *0535+0582
* for Initial capitals, and *0535+0542* for all capitals or small capitals.
It would also require that 0535+057E for Initial capitals, and 0535+054E
for All caps and small caps be changed to 0587 when moving back to lower
case.

There are other Armenian ligatures in Unicode (U+FB13..FB17). I have not
yet found my documentation on those glyphs to tell me if they are the same
or different in East vs. West.

*Additional Documentation Problem*

The Unicode documentation for U+0587 indicates that it is a ligature of
U+0587 and U+0582, which is true for Armenian-West, but not for
Armenian-East.

*Recommendation for Supporting Ligature Requirements*

Where I have two different sets of instructions for the same Unicode value
(U+0587), I must have separate language definitions for Armenian-East and
Armenian-West to properly handle the casing, etc.

Hope this helps

George
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.aau.at/pipermail/mpeg-otspec/attachments/20130628/be35eb3d/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/x-ygp-stripped
Size: 171 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.aau.at/pipermail/mpeg-otspec/attachments/20130628/be35eb3d/attachment.bin>