SC2/WG2 N2522

L2/02-313R
PROPOSAL SUMMARY FORM
A. Administrative
1.Title:Proposal to encode the Greek Capital Letter San and Greek Small Letter San in the UCS
2. Requester's name:
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae Project (University of California, Irvine)
3. Requester type:
Expert contribution
4. Submission date:
2002-11-07
5. Requester's reference:
6. Completion:
This is a complete proposal.
B. Technical - General
1. The proposal is for addition of character(s) to an existing block:
Greek and Coptic (proposed positions: U+03FA and U+03FB)
2. Number of characters in proposal:
Two
3. Proposed category:C
4. Proposed Level of Implementation:
Level 15a. Character name provided?
Yes
5b. Character name in accordance with guidelines:
Yes
5c. Character shape reviewable?
Yes
6a. Who will provide the appropriate computerized font for publishing thestandard?
TLG Project6b. Fonts currently available.
No.
6c. Font format:
True Type
7a. Are references provided?
Yes.
7b. Are published examples of use of proposed character attached?
Yes.
8. Does the proposal address other aspects of character data processing?
No.

C. Technical - Justification
1. Has this proposal for addition of character(s) been submitted before?
No.
2. Has contact been made to members of the user community?
Yes. Kevin Clinton, Cornell University and Epigraphy Project; Stephen Tracy, Ohio State
University and American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece.
3. Information on the user community for the proposed character:
Scholarly community (especially epigraphical studies)4. The context of use for the proposed character:
Greek inscriptions
5. Is the proposed character in current use by the user community?
Yes. Character is present in various editions of Greek inscriptions.
6. After giving due considerations to the principles in Principles and Procedures
document, must the proposed character be entirely in the BMP?
Yes.
If YES, is a rationale provided?
Accordance with the Roadmap.
7. Should the proposed character be kept together in a contiguous range (ratherthan being scattered)?
Yes. It should be placed together with other Greek alphabetic characters.
8. Can the proposed character be considered a presentation form of an existing
character or character sequence?
No.
9. Can the proposed character be encoded using a composed character sequence ofeither existing characters or other proposed characters?
No.
10. Can the proposed character be considered to be similar (in appearanceor function) to an existing character?
Yes. Greek Capital Letter San is similar but not identical to 039C Greek Capital Letter
Mu. Greek Small Letter San is similar but not identical to 03BC Greek Small Letter Mu.
11a. Does the proposal include use of combining characters and/or use of composite
sequences?
No.
12. Does the proposal contain characters with any special properties such ascontrol function or similar semantics?
No.
13. Does the proposal contain any Ideographic compatibility character(s)?
No.

2Proposal to encode Archaic Letter San in the UTS
San is an archaic letter attested in early inscriptions. It derives from the Phoenician scriptand occupies the position following the letter pi (see Example 1). Several but not all
Greek cities used it.1 It was used in the Doric dialect of Crete and Corinth but not in theIonic. Greek cities which used San did not simultaneously use Sigma. By the second halfof the fifth century BC. San was replaced by Sigma (except in Crete where it appears tohave been used after the fifth century, or as an emblem on the coins of Sikyon and as abrand for a breed of horses called 'samphorae' (see Aristophanes, Eq. 603).
San looks similar to the later letter mu (different from archaic mu which has a shorter leg)but represents a sibilant, which later became a Sigma. In modern texts and in the absenseof font representation, the convention has been to use sigma in representing the archaic
San. However, epigraphers worldwide who deal with archaic materials need to have thecharacter represented in Unicode. Since all other archaic Greek letters are alreadyrepresented in Unicode, San is a reasonable addition to the existing archaic set. Early
ancient Greek inscriptions preserve letters in upper-case only. Both Capital and small
letter San are proposed for the sake of completeness and consistency with the encoding ofother archaic characters.

1Jeffery (1990) 33

3Greek Capital Letter San
Sign

Similar Unicode

Example 1L.H Jeffery, The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece (Oxford 1990) Plate 20

Greek Small Letter SanSign

Similar Unicode

Example 1
See example for Greek Letter San above.

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