ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N2173
2000-03-03
Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set
International Organization for Standardization
Organisation internationale de normalisationŒåæäóíàðîäíàß îðãàíèçàöèß ïî ñòàíäàðòèçàöèèDoc Type: Working Group Document
Title:
Proposal to add 8 Cyrillic Sámi characters to ISO/IEC 10646
Source: NTS (Norway), SFS (Finland), and NSAI (Ireland)
Status:National Body Contribution
Action:For consideration by JTC1/SC2/WG2 and UTC
Date:
2000-03-03
This document is based on the proposal submitted by NTS in 1997 as WG2 N1813. It is a revision ofN1813 based on expert input, and contains the proposal summary.

A. Administrative
1. Title
Proposal to add 8 Cyrillic Sámi characters to ISO/IEC 10646.
2. Requester’s name
NTS (Norway) SFS (Finland). and NSAI (Ireland).
3. Requester type
National body contribution.
4. Submission date
2000-03-03.
5. Requester’s reference
http://www.egt.ie/standards/se/kild.html (N1813), ISO-IR 200.
6a. Completion
This is a complete proposal.
6b. More information to be provided?
No.

B. Technical -- General
1a. New script? Name?
No.
1b. Addition of characters to existing block? Name?
Yes. Cyrillic.
2. Number of characters8.
3. Proposed category
Category A.
4. Proposed level of implementation and rationale
Level 1. Base characters with no diacritics.
5a. Character names included in proposal?
Yes.
5b. Character names in accordance with guidelines?
Yes (see below).
5c. Character shapes reviewable?
Yes (see below).
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Proposal for the Universal Character Set

6a. Who will provide computerized font?
Michael Everson, EGT.
6b. Font currently available?
Yes.
6c. Font format?
TrueType.
7a. Are references (to other character sets, dictionaries, descriptive texts, etc.) provided?
Yes (see below).
7b. Are published examples (such as samples from newspapers, magazines, or other sources) of useof proposed characters attached?
Yes (see below).
8. Does the proposal address other aspects of character data processing?
No.

C. Technical -- Justification
1. Contact with the user community?
Yes, with Saamskij sektor, Akademija NAUK, Murmansk, Russian Federation.
2. Information on the user community?
See below.
3a. The context of use for the proposed characters?
Letters of the Kildin Sámi alphabet.
3b. Reference
See bibliography below.
4a. Proposed characters in current use?
Yes.
4b. Where?
Chiefly in the Barents region, particularly in the Kola Peninsula.
5a. Characters should be encoded entirely in BMP?
Yes.
5b. Rationale
Keeping them with other Cyrillic characters used by Kildin Sámi.
6. Should characters be kept in a continuous range?
No.
7a. Can the characters be considered a presentation form of an existing character or character
sequence?
No.
7b. Where?
7c. Reference
8a. Can any of the characters be considered to be similar (in appearance or function) to an existingcharacter?
Yes, EN WITH TAIL looks superficially like EN WITH DESCENDER. But the differences are striking enough towarrant against their unification. EN WITH TAIL indicates voiceless /n/ in Kildin Sámi. EN WITH HOOK isused for the velar nasal (eng) in Kildin Sámi. EN WITH DESCENDER is used for the velar nasal in Tatar andother Turkic languages. The other letters WITH TAIL indicate voiceless sounds in Kildin Sámi.
8b. Where?
See examples below.
8c. Reference
9a. Combining characters or use of composite sequences included?
No.
9b. List of composite sequences and their corresponding glyph images provided?

Proposal for the Universal Character Set

No.
10. Characters with any special properties such as control function, etc. included?
No.

D. Proposal
User community
According to the 1989 Soviet census, (Vestnik Statistiki 1/1989) there are 1888 Kildin Sámi, of which
1,001 have Sámi as their home language. Kildin Sámi is spoken on the Kola peninsula, in Murmansk
Oblast' of North Western Russia.
Sámi is a school subject in primary schools, and articles are occasionally published in Sámi in the local
newspaper Lovozerskaja Pravda. As a result of the opening of the borders, the Kildin Sámis are now
involved in international Sámi cooperation, among other things in the Sámi Council (active in Russia,Finland, Sweden, and Norway, with its main secretariat in Finland). There is a long scholarly tradition ofresearch on the Sámi (as well as other Uralic) languages, with important research centres including
Murmansk, Helsinki, Uppsala, Tromsø, Hamburg, Bloomington, and Budapest, for example. Each ofthese institutions has published materials on and in Kildin Sámi.
The Kildin Sámi literary language is in use in schools, in dictionaries, books, magazines, and ininternational cooperation (the Kildin Sámi are one of the few minorities of Russia that have relatives inother countries). Many of the Kildin Sámi books are currently being printed in Norway. The language isalso in scientific use in Russia and abroad.

Structure
Historical background for the Kildin Sámi script
The development of literary Kildin Sámi follows the path of the other non-Slavic languages quite closely.
It was written for the first time in the second half of the 19th century, in religious texts using anorthography based on the Cyrillic alphabet. In the late 1920s and early 1930s the Institute of the NorthernPeoples initiated work that resulted in a Latin-based orthography, developed by Z. Černjakov, acceptedby Narkompros RSFSR in 1931-05. This orthography was in use until 1937, when it was replaced by aCyrillic orthography, developed by A. G. Èndjukovskij. Up to this point, the development of the Sámi
orthography was similar to that of all other non-Slavic languages of the Soviet Union. After the Second
World War, almost all these languages carried on using their newly developed Cyrillic orthographies,
with the exception of the deported nationalities (Crimean Tartars, etc.), and of the nationalities with close
relatives in Finland (Karelians, Vepsians, and Sámis).
As for the Sámis, work was initiated in the early 1970s to reintroduce the Sámi language in schools,according to school authorities because it was observed that the Sámi children did not master the Russian
language properly. It was quickly realized that, unlike the 1931 Latin orthography, the 1937 Cyrillicorthography did not match the phonemic structure of the Kildin Sámi language, and a new orthography
was devised, and formally accepted in 1982.
Cyrillic characters in ISO/IEC 10646
Almost all Cyrillic characters of the former Soviet Union are included in 10646. The ones missing areexactly those not used in the decades following the Second World War. Thus, these characters were,presumably, missing from the sources that were used in the preparatory work for the Cyrillic part of10646.
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Proposal for the Universal Character Set

The repertoire requested is given here with proposed code positions:Ø 048ACYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SHORT I WITH TAIL

Ù 048BCYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SHORT I WITH TAIL

¼ 04C5CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER EL WITH TAIL

½ 04C6CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER EL WITH TAIL

¾ 04C9CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER EN WITH TAIL

¿ 04CACYRILLIC SMALL LETTER EN WITH TAIL

Ë 04CDCYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER EM WITH TAIL

Ì 04CECYRILLIC SMALL LETTER EM WITH TAIL

Unicode Character Properties
Spacing letters, category “Lu”, bidi category “L” (strong left to right)
048A, 04C5, 04C9, 04CD

Spacing letters, category “Ll”, bidi category “L” (strong left to right)
048B, 04C6, 04CA, 04CE

BibliographyŠóðó÷, •èììà „ìèòðèåâíà. 1985. ‘ààìñêî-ðóññêèé ñëîâàðü = ‘àÃìü-ðóÃøø ñîàãêíýÛêü. Œîñêâà:•óññêèé ßçûê.
Šóðó÷, •èììà „ìèòðèåâíà, …êàòåðèíà ˆâàíîâíà Œå÷êèíà, •îçà ˆâàíîâíà Ÿêîâëåâà, ˆðàèäà
‚ëàäèìèðîâíà ‚èíîãðàäîâà, & •èíà …ëèñååâíà €ôàíàñüåâà. 1991. •óÃäçúåí÷: 3 êëàññãóýéêý ëîÃãêýì êíèÃãà = Žëåøåê: êíèãà äëß äîïîëèòåëüíîãî ÷òåíèß â 3 êëàññå ñààìñêîé
øêîëû. Œóðìàí (Œóðìàíñê); Œîñêâà: ˆíñòèòóò ßçûêîçíàíèß €• •”.
Šóðó÷, •èììà „ìèòðèåâíà, •èíà …ëèñååâíà €ôàíàñüåâà, …êàòåðèíà ˆâàíîâíà Œå÷êèíà, €. ƒ.
•âîðîñòóõèíà, & •îçà ˆâàíîâíà Ÿêîâëåâà. 1998. ‘àÃìü êèÃëë: ŽÂÛïíóââýì êíèÃãà 2 êëàññ
ãóýéêý = ‘ààìñêèé ßçûê äëß 2-ãî êëàññà ñààìñêîé øêîëû. Œóðìàí (Œóðìàíñê): ˆíñòèòóòßçûêîçíàíèß €• •”.
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Proposal for the Universal Character Set

FPDAM 30 contained 6 of the 8 letters proposed here as letters WITH DESCENDER (previous research andleading to N1813, based partly on Russian typewriter fonts, and partly on western fonts made by people
with no contact with the user community, led to the assumption that EN WITH TAIL was unifiable with ENWITH DESCENDER). Further discussion and font development showed that this unification was false, andthat TAIL and DESCENDER are different things. Ireland disapproved the FPDAM which contained the 6incorrect characters for the following reason given below. The US and Norway also disapproved forsimilar reasons. From the Irish comments:
Although characters similar to these are indeed used in Kildin Sámi, both the names and glyphs of the charactersin this FPDAM are incorrect. This information was obtained in meetings with Rimma Kuruč in Tromsø earlier
this year. Rimma is the author of the large Sámi-Russian dictionary.
As it happens, a false identification was made with the Kildin Sámi characters and characters WITH DESCENDER.
But the TAIL on Kildin Sámi characters is very different from a descender.
Compare a set of characters with true DESCENDERs in plain and italic styles with the Kildin Sámi characters. The
two-stroke 7-shaped TAIL differs markedly from the one-stroke DESCENDER. In a sans serif font the nature of theTAIL is particularly clear.

In the examples here, the letter EN WITH DESCENDER used in Tatar and other Turkic languages is shown, as
are the ordinary letters TSE and SHCHA used in Russian, which also have DESCENDERs. The remainingletters are the Kildin Sámi letters with the TAIL , which, as noted above, is a diacritic denoting
voicelessness. The fonts are Latinski and Bastion.

¾¿|–ö™ù|ØÙ¼½ËÌ¾¿¾¿|–ö™ù|ØÙ¼½ËÌ¾¿¾¿|–ö™ù|ØÙ¼½ËÌ¾¿¾¿|–ö™ù|ØÙ¼½ËÌ¾¿Note that TSE and SHCHA often appear in Kildin Sámi texts. These often have glyph variants with longswash tilde-shaped descenders in some Russian fonts.

5Proposal for the Universal Character Set

From Šóðó÷ 1985, a Sámi-Russian Dictionary. Note that the TAIL glyphs here are a kind of comma fusedto the letter, just as the Latinski italic forms shown above are.

From Šóðó÷ et al. 1991, a reading book for primary school. Font is a typewriter font, similar to thecomputer font Kurier.

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Proposal for the Universal Character Set

From Šóðó÷ et al. 1998, a reading book for primary school. Reduced to 70%. The lack of capital forms
here is indicative in this pedagogical work only of the fact that no Kildin Sámi word begins with theseletters. In all-caps environments the capital forms are always used, as seen in the headword ‹…ÂËËœŠ inthe sample from Šóðó÷ 1985 shown above.

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