Stefan Persson wrote:
> In old Swedish there was a tradition of writing words of
> foreign origin in the Roman type of letters (in Swedish
> referred to as "antikva"), while the rest of the words
> were written in Fraktur.
I have seen the same usage in German, on an old Duden dictionary: words of
foreign origins and etymologies were in Roman, the rest being in Fraktur.
> This is similar to the difference between katakana and
> hiragana/kanji in modern Japanese.
And a similar difference is used in all modern European languages: roman for
normal text and italics for foreign words.
But notice that roman, italics and Fraktur all look alike and share a common
origin, while katakana and hiragana letters are very different and generally
derive from completely different ideographs.
> [...] I know that the letters A-z are already supported
> in the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbol block (and some
> in the Letterlike Symbols block),
AFAIK, those characters should not be used to compose text: they are
supposed to be *symbols* to be used by mathematicians too busy to set a
different font. ;-)
_ Marco
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jan 29 2002 - 13:08:53 EST