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Character Stories: U+02EA, U+02EB Yin / Yang Departing Tone Marks

Peter Constable, 2003-06-19

[Source: Ken Whistler, Transcription List 2003-6-19]

U+02EB and U+02EA come from the TCA submissions regarding for Minnan and Hakka languages, for use with extended Bopomofo. You can find examples in those documents. They are mixed there with other Bopomofo tone diacritics. See WG2 N1713 for the initial submission. (1998-03-16)

Here is the scheme as represented there, with Taiwanese
examples:


Yin level (unmarked)	tong1 ‘east’
Yin rising U+02CB (with Bopomofo glyph)	tong2 ‘a surname’
Yin departing U+02EA	tong3 ‘freeze’
Yin entering (unmarked)	tong4 ‘supervise’
Yang level U+02CA (with Bopomofo glyph)	tong5 ‘child’
Yang departing U+02EB	tong7 ‘cave’
Yang entering U+02D9	tok8 ‘poison’

In Bopomofo these tone marks are typeset in a separate vertical line to the right of the vertical line of Bopomofo. In horizontal typesetting, they are either over the top of the Bopomofo or set at the upper-right shoulder of the Bopomofo character representing the ‘final’ of a syllable.

It is possible that they were originally designed by a dyslexic based on the Chao tone letters, but no, they are not really intended to be used as particular values of those or as an augmentation of those tone letters. Instead, as I indicated, they are used with another collection of tonal diacritics for extended Bopomofo.

So no, they glyphs haven’t been munged. But these obviously need better annotation for the names list.

[From a subsequent message in the same thread:]

> That sounds, then, like these are *not* two of the left-stemmed tone letters (mirrors of 02E5..02E9) that I'm going to be including in a proposal for additional modifier characters for tone.

Correct. They are just one-off tonal diacritics, and probably should only appear in Bopomofo fonts (or ones which support the tonal conventions of Bopomofo).

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