Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 November 20

= November 20 =

Lack of y-breve
(Unsure whether to post here or at the computing desk, but my interest is more linguistic:) Why is it that there's no precomposed Unicode character for y with breve? The pairing of macrons and breves comes from a Greco-Roman metrical tradition where y/υ was a fully established vowel, so why is it that centuries later we're still stuck with only ă, ĕ, ĭ, ŏ, ŭ – versus ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, ȳ – for precomposed characters? Lazar Taxon (talk) 23:10, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Possibly because it's not used as a separate letter in any actual living language? If I am to guess... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 03:28, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Precomposed characters were put in Unicode to facilitate translation from other existing standards; otherwise we could use combining characters all the time. The precomposed "Latin letter... with breve" characters in Unicode are all in the Latin Extended-A block, which were taken from a family of existing standards.  So if y-breve didn't get a precomposed character, it must be because none of those standards included y-breve as a character. --174.89.144.126 (talk) 07:54, 21 November 2022 (UTC)


 * The Unicode people have historically had a somewhat ambiguous attitude toward pre-composed characters, and they really don't feel much motivation to "complete the set" on their own initiative. They also have much the same attitude toward "box-drawing" characters... AnonMoos (talk) 00:08, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
 * To be honest, my real problem is that with combining characters like y̆, the diacritic tends to render just slightly off from where it should be (typically a couple pixels left of the precomposed diacritics at high font sizes). It's not visible at normal sizes, but I still just know, y'know? Lazar Taxon (talk) 03:18, 22 November 2022 (UTC)