Re: Colours

From: William Overington (WOverington@ngo.globalnet.co.uk)
Date: Sun Oct 22 2000 - 04:53:59 EDT


I am reminded of some pictures I once saw on collectable postcards. The
pictures were reproductions from a medieval book, possibly, but I am not
sure, The Tres Riches Heures of the Duc du Berry, which is a famous
manuscript book. (There should be a grave accent on the e in Tres.) In
those pictures, one for each month of the year, there was a square or maybe
rectangular picture at the bottom with a painting depicting seasonal topics,
such as gathering grapes or snow on the ground and so on, characteristic of
the particular month, and above it a semicircular area, so that the top of
the picture was approximately the horizontal diameter of the semicircle,
with numbers representing the days of the month going clockwise from
positions that I can best describe here in text in terms of a modern clock
face, as going from 9 o'clock to 3 o'clock.

Some of the numbers were black and some were red.

I do not know the details of why this was, though possibly they are Saints'
Days. In any case, here colour was being used to convey a different meaning
to symbols. It may be that there was an explanation on another page of the
book, a text page which was not available on the postcards. Does anyone
know about this please?

So, although this is not congruently a situation as asked in the question as
it is not a language as such, nevertheless if one were transcribing the
numbers into a text page, one would need to carry the information forward in
some way, as the colour is significant.

William Overington

22 October 2000

-----Original Message-----
From: 11digitboy@bolt.com <11digitboy@bolt.com>
To: Unicode List <unicode@unicode.org>
Date: Friday, October 20, 2000 4:05 AM
Subject: Colours

>Are there languages you might need to encode where
>colour is important? (such as, if a certain shape
>in red is one letter, but in blue it is a different
>letter)
>
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