From: jcowan@reutershealth.com
Date: Mon Dec 15 2003 - 12:24:43 EST
Arcane Jill scripsit:
> I sometimes wonder whether or not it was a wise choice to regard "LATIN
> SMALL LETTER I" and "LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I" as distinct. Too late
> to change it now, of course, but (with the benefit of hindsight) it
> occurs to me that if U+0069 had been regarded as dotless, all these
> problems would never have arisen. Western fonts could still have
> rendered it with a dot, Turkish fonts could have rendered it without a
> dot, and everyone would have been happy.
Unicode didn't get any choice about it. The 8859-3 and 8859-9 equivalents
separated dotted-i from dotless-i (Turkish needs both) and identified the
former, not the latter, with the ASCII i.
> As an analogy, albeit a rather silly one, if (in mathematics) I put a
> dot over a (single-letter) variable name to indicate (say) first
> derivative or something, I would have to put an /extra/ dot over i,
> would I not? Does that not make it "conceptually" dotless, even though
> it's rendered with a dot?
In a sense that's correct: an i or j with an accent loses its dot, and if
there is a dot present regardless, it is a dot-above diacritic and not
the native dot.
-- John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com> http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht. --Albert Einstein
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