Today while taking a look at a Unicode 15 draft, I saw a pdf that talked about small hiragana and [katakana ko](https://unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-15.0/U150-1B130.pdf). Is this actually a thing? How is it used? Also, the same file talked about other small letters like small wi, we, wo and katakana n. What are those for?
2 comments
Seems like the other small letters are for archaic Japanese texts. See the History section in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Kana_Extension.
For LETTER SMALL KO, the 2011 proposal just cites their use in Adobe character collections and a table in a document called 「CTS 文字コード索引辞書〈 JIS・EUC・SK 編〉」(Hakkō Shōji Co., Ltd. 1992. ISBN
4-7952-9120-9). https://unicode.org/L2/L2010/10468r2-lunde.pdf
I tried searching around, but [I wasn’t able to find any public reasoning](https://www.google.com/search?q=LETTER+SMALL+KO+1B132+site:unicode.org&domains=unicode.org&ei=hwEQY6zxEKvH0PEPrMyk8As&start=0&sa=N&ved=2ahUKEwjs0Mnar_L5AhWrIzQIHSwmCb44ChDy0wN6BAgBEDk&biw=1366&bih=666&dpr=1) on why it’s being added to Unicode now. If you really want to know, Ken Lunde seems like the guy to ask. He wrote the original proposal and he’s still involved with Unicode.
I do not know specifically for the new ones, but there is many small katakana that are used to write Ainu. There is also some extra characters with diacritics.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_language)
As the document you liked suggest, it seems to be “historic” characters, so there might have been a used at some point in the past.