From: Andrew C. West (andrewcwest@alumni.princeton.edu)
Date: Wed Nov 26 2003 - 07:40:42 EST
On Tue, 25 Nov 2003 16:16:15 -0800, "Doug Ewell" wrote:
>
> Well, one reason could be that there is no such character. (Did you
> mean U+1034A GOTHIC LETTER NINE HUNDRED?)
>
But why do U+10341 [GOTHIC LETTER NINETY] and U+1034A [GOTHIC LETTER NINE
HUNDRED], which are letters that are only ever used to represent the numbers 90
and 900 respectively (they have no intrinsic phonetic value), not have a numeric
value assigned to them ? Is this perhaps because all the other Gothic letters
can also be used to represent numbers in exactly the same way that U+10341 and
U+1034A are used (these two letter were devised specifically to fill the gap in
the series of numbers represented by the ordinary Gothic letters), and in this
respect the two Gothic letters Ninety and Nine Hundred are no different from the
other Gothic letters which can be used to represent numbers but that do not have
a numeric value assigned to them by Unicode ?
On the other hand, the Gothic situation is analogous to Runic, in which the
three runes U+16EE..16F0 [RUNIC ARLAUG/TVIMADUR/BELGTHOR SYMBOL], which were
added to the sixteen-letter futhark in order to represent the complete set of
nineteen golden numbers using Runic letters, are assigned numeric values of
17..19 by Unicode.
BTW I've just noticed that U+10341 has a general category of "Lo" (Letter,
Other), whereas U+1034A has a general category of "Nl" (Number, Letter), which
seems a little odd.
Andrew
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