Re: Umlaut and diaeresis

From: John Cowan (cowan@locke.ccil.org)
Date: Mon Jun 21 1999 - 15:20:04 EDT


Figge, Donald scripsit:
>
> Because these two characters are unified, the composition software needs to
> be smart enough to know that a word can be divided between two vowels when
> one of them has a diaeresis mark, but not necessarily if the same mark is
> intended to serve as an umlaut.

Very true. Composition is inherently language-specific (such a
fundamental point as mapping a "fi" sequence to the corresponding
ligature must be suppressed for Turkish and, IIRC, Portuguese),
so a universal encoding can give little help with it.

> The argument that alphabetic characters are pronounced differently in
> various languages but still have the same code point misses the point of my
> original question which is why unification when the umlaut and diaeresis
> have different basic functionalities.

My point was that diacritics hav different "basic functionalities"
anyway, and are set up on a shape basis because that avoids over-fine
splits.

-- 
John Cowan					cowan@ccil.org
		e'osai ko sarji la lojban.



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