From: Peter Kirk (peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com)
Date: Tue Jul 29 2003 - 09:35:11 EDT
On 28/07/2003 21:18, Jony Rosenne wrote:
>The most reasonable way to achieve visible effects, as opposed to difference
>in text, is by markup.
>
>Jony
>
>
>
But, Jony, this IS a difference in the text. It is a different character
sequence with a very different pronunciation and a thousand year history
of a different graphical representation. Joan has shown that it is NOT
just a difference made in one recent text as some had suggested. It was
just convenient to lose the graphical distinction when computers were
not powerful or well enough specified to make it.
This reminds me of the polytonic Greek issue. If I understand correctly,
the Greek government decided to do away with the distinction between
accents because this was easier to implement with 1960's computers. But
modern use in Greece is not the entire range of the Greek language, and
so Unicode was forced to backtrack and add a whole extra block for
polytonic Greek. As with Greek, so with Hebrew, Unicode has to support
thousands of years of language history and not just usage since the
1960's deliberately simplified for the computer age. The difference is
that the Greek accents were not pronounced differently, at least in
modern Greek, but the Hebrew letters are pronounced very differently.
Also we are talking about adding at most one letter, or none at all,
certainly not a whole block.
If we are to use markup to distinguish between characters which are
semantically and phonetically as well as graphically distinct, we may as
well reduce Unicode to one character and make all distinctions with
markup. ;-)
-- Peter Kirk peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
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