On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, John Cowan wrote:
> John Hudson scripsit:
>
> > The newish Gagauz Turkish Latin-script orthography derives from both
> > Turkish and Romanian models. This has led to a peculiar hybrid, in which
> > the cedilla is used for the s and the commaaccent is used for the t.
>
> ME's remarks in _The Alphabets of Europe_ seem downright bizarre to me:
>
> # Note that in
> # Romania, Gagauz uses the characters S WITH COMMA BELOW and T WITH COMMA BELOW.
> # In inferior Gagauz typography, the glyphs for these characters are sometimes
> # drawn with CEDILLAs, but it is strongly recommended to avoid this practice.
> # However, because Gagauz is a Turkic language, it may be left to the user to
> # decide whether S WITH COMMA BELOW (as in Romanian) or S WITH CEDILLA (as in
> # Turkish) is preferred.
>
> It seems that the last two sentences say that it may be left to the user
> to decide whether inferior or superior typography is preferred.
>
> --
> De plichten van een docent zijn divers, John Cowan
> die van het gehoor ook. jcowan@reutershealth.com
> --Edsger Dijkstra http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
>
>
Friday, August 16, 2002
If fools such as I who know no Gagauz may rush in: It seems to me that
reading is learned habit. When different people learned to read Gagauz
they may have learned to expect different forms of glyphs because that's
what they were taught. Assuming teaching different conventions isn't based
on an evil intent to pervert the minds of children, differing conventions
are not "bad" only different. It may be that such different conventions
will gradually evolve to one but I think Unicode would be wise to avoid
attempting to impose standards on how written text appears and should
instead aim to facilitate presentation of text legible to the conventions
of current readers.
We all live with two forms of lower case t (with and without the
curved bottom) and lower case g (with and without the closed descender).
It's possible these different conventions will disappear but until they do
some will want one and some will want the other and I would hope Unicode
could permit rendering software to provide either.
Regards,
Jim Agenbroad ( jage@LOC.gov )
"It is not true that people stop pursuing their dreams because they
grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing their dreams." Adapted
from a letter by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
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