Created attachment 15537 [details] [review]
patch for homophonic ua layout

A 'homophonic' layout for Ukrainian ('ua'), different from the existing 'phonetic' variant.  Designed with commonly-used homophonic layouts for Windows and Mac systems in mind, and matches well with Ukrainian National Transliteration.

Non-X systems have different phonetic layouts for Ukrainian, due to them not having (or previously not having) an in-built phonetic layout.  The common ones are very similar; there are only a few differences between all of them and the existing 'phonetic' variant of the xbkd 'ua' layout, however these differences are significant:
-  Cyrillic_ve (в) is always mapped to <LatV>
-  Cyrillic_ghe (г) is always mapped to <LatH>
-  Ukrainian_ghe_with_upturn (ґ) is always mapped to <LatG>
-  Cyrillic_ha is always mapped to <LatX>
et cetera.  It is also common to leave <AB08> as a comma, and <AB08> as a full stop.

The assignment of most letters in the 'homophonic' layout was based on the above.  When mapping non-letter characters (such as punctuation marks, brackets etc) I tried to retain those most relevant for punctuation, internet/e-mail and Unix prompts.  I opted to map the less (<) and greater (>) symbols rather than U+226A (≪) and U+226B (≫) for speech.  Unfortunately, asciitilde (~) was left out.

This variant was named 'homophonic' because a variant with the name 'phonetic' already exists, and because such variants are often called 'homophonic' layouts on non-X systems.


As may be apparent, I have not previously made a submission here.  I apologise for any breach of protocol, or misinterpretation of the submission rules.  Please point out any corrections I should make.