Re: LATIN U/V

From: Marco Cimarosti (marco.cimarosti@europe.com)
Date: Wed May 17 2000 - 06:34:40 EDT


Antoine Leca wrote:
> Marco Cimarosti wrote:
> > Uppercase should be *V*, and lowercase should be *u*.
> I believe this is not the better way to go for *every* usage.
> I agree this is the way the rendering will look the better, at
> least without
> resorting to outside mechanisms such as John Hudson described.

It is the way to go only if you want to reproduce the traditional typographic appearance of Latin. I would not suggest it for a modern Latin grammar, although I noticed that this spelling is very popular in modern French and German linguistics texts.

> However, other handlings of the text will be probably more
> difficult.
> For example, uppercasing (although it just mean an altered
> table).

As discussed for many other cases on this list (e.g. Turkish i), case folding is language dependent. In this case, it would also be dependent on spelling preferences (traditional vs. modern).

> More problematic to me is the use of the length marks: while u
> with breve and
> macrons are indeed forcasted, V with breve or macron are not,
> so exchange from
> one to the other is likely to be problematic: need to use the
> combining character,
> which do complicate the casing process a lot, needless to
> mention processing
> texts where some V's really mean consonants, while other,
> those that are followed
> by combining accents, are vowels...

Well, combining diacritics are there to be used, and application must support them, or they are bogus.

The fact that a particular precomposed letter/diacritic code point exists should be considered a (slightly deprecable) exception, not a sine-qua-non condition to display.

(I am afraid that WC3 are making a major mistake, and setting a really bad predent, with their "early composition").

Moreover, I wonder whether macrons and breves (as well as accents) may be considered as regular features of Latin spelling? I've seen them only on modern dictionaries, grammars, exercise books, etc. And, in these kinds of texts, I would prefer to see the modern distinctions i/j and u/v, which are much more helpful learners.

> PS: the report on the use of v/U is fascinating. Thanks

I hope it is also accurate... I would really like to resume the name of the author of that old proposal, as a starting point for further investigation.

_ Marco
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