[Coptic Language] Characters used with Diacritics Ⲁ᷍Ⲁ, Ⲁ︤, Ⲁ︥, and Ⲁ︦

(need this for the design of a font)

Which Coptic characters may have the following diacritics applied to them (in any dialect)?
  1. 'COMBINING DOUBLE CIRCUMFLEX ABOVE' (U+1DCD): Ⲁ᷍Ⲁ
  2. 'COMBINING MACRON LEFT HALF' (U+FE24): Ⲁ︤
  3. 'COMBINING MACRON RIGHT HALF' (U+FE25): Ⲁ︥
  4. 'COMBINING CONJOINING MACRON' (U+FE26): Ⲁ︦
P.S. Shouldn't we add "Coptic Language" as a category in our forum?

Comments

  • Hello,

    We are also working on a unicode font suite of our legacy CS fonts. That is the reason why we haven't pushed unicode on the forum. Yet, in the Coptic font page on copticchurch.net has already moved to applying unicode with a CS keyboard layout.

    As for your question above. I don't think there is a standard since we never used these options in any of the coptic font. It was always macron that is needed for coptic.
  • edited July 2021
    I don't know any circumstances to use the double circumflex. There is the COMBINING CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT Unicode: U+0302, that is used in Sahidic. ⲁ̂ ⲟ̂ ⲱ̂. This one is usually over the vowels.

    The left/right half macron is used in Sahidic. I would include it for all the letters.

    The combining conjoining macron is an alternative to the combining overline (U+0305). I would include both. I personally prefer to use the combining conjoining macron as the supralinear line. In the CS font I modified I used the combining overline to display three lines over the letter for numbers.

    There is also a COMBINING MACRON Unicode: U+0304 which is important for Sahidic. The left macron, combining macron, and right macron should all be able to combine together. ⲡ︥ⲛ̄ⲁ︤
  • Sorry, the Combining Macron is used as a standalone like in ⲛ̄. The combining conjoining is used in the middle for sahidic with the left/right half like this: ⲡ︥ⲛ︦ⲁ︤.
  • This is only tangentially related, but is the combining grave accent (as a jenkim) supposed to be placed before or after the target character? I've found that some fonts (Noto Sans Coptic) want it before, while others (Segoe UI Historic) want it after. Is there a standard?
  • Unicode standards says that any marks, like a grave accent, comes after the base letter. This is the norm in Arabic letters with tashkeel. If a font "doesn't look right" when you follow the standards, then it might of not been designed using opentype to position marks correctly... Or possibly applications are unable to read a fonts opentype code
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