Request: Support for Akan/Twi, Lingala, Dinka, Manding and Ewe

[AshtarBalynestjar]

This is mostly a continuation of my African language requests. The orthographies of these languages all share the letters ɛ ɔ to represent half-open vowels similar to the ones in English ‘share’ and ‘law’.

Akan (~9.3 million speakers) and Lingala (~9.1 million speakers) only use those extended letters. Tone can be marked with combining diacritics (at least ɛ̀ ɛ̀ ɛ̂ ɛ̌), but they’re rarely used outside of dictionaries.

Dinka (~1.3 million speakers) uses the letters ɣ ŋ in addition to ɛ ɔ, as well as the combining diaeresis to represent a series of breathy vowels.

The Manding languages (at least ~8.8 million native speakers) use the additional letters ɛ ɔ ŋ ɲ when written in Latin script. The vowels can take the same set of tone marks as in Lingala, but they’re only used in dictionaries.

Ewe (~3.6 million speakers) has the largest character set in this request. Besides the previously mentioned ɛ ɔ ɣ ŋ, it also uses ɖ ƒ ʋ, as well as combining tone marks. Note that ƒ is an actual letter in Ewe, not just the florin sign (see issue #42 on the Source Sans repository).

[frankrolf]

This would be addressed by extending the character set support to AL5.

Some stats to keep track of the requested characters:

code point	character	name	supported	in AL5
U+014B	ŋ	LATIN SMALL LETTER ENG	(✔)	✔
U+0192	ƒ	LATIN SMALL LETTER F WITH HOOK	(✔)	✔
U+0254	ɔ	LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN O	✘	✔
U+0256	ɖ	LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH TAIL	✘	✔
U+025B	ɛ	LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN E	✘	✔
U+0263	ɣ	LATIN SMALL LETTER GAMMA	✘	✔
U+0272	ɲ	LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH LEFT HOOK	✘	✔
U+028B	ʋ	LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH HOOK	✘	✔
U+0308	̈	COMBINING DIAERESIS	✔	✔

Some questions:

• I assume the uppercase characters also are understood to be part of this request?
• which shape of eng/Eng is preferred in the respective languages?

[moyogo]

The current ƒ U+0192 Source Serif is not usable in Ewe. It should be upright and have the vertical size of f and j. The florin currency symbol is often italic, short or with a low horizontal bar, but there are a few cases where it was an italic f-hook or even a roman f-hook.

For example in de Stem, 1986-08-06, page 4

[frankrolf]

Thanks for this (and your other comments on various issues), @moyogo ! Much appreciated.

[moyogo]

which shape of eng/Eng is preferred in the respective languages?

The n-form Eng is preferred in Akan and Ewe in the versions of the Language guide published by Ghana government’s Bureau of Ghana Languages, in Ewe in the Alphabet national du Bénin. In Manding languages like Bambara, the most common shape is the large n-form Eng instead of the N-form. This is also true for Ɲ, the large n-form is common as well in the languages that use the letter.

[moyogo]

Ah, I forgot I had already provided samples in #67.