Re: Latin letter GHA or Latin letter IO ?

From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Sat Jan 03 2004 - 18:15:53 EST

  • Next message: Peter Kirk: "Re: Pre-1923 characters?"

    On 03/01/2004 14:23, Philippe Verdy wrote:

    > ...
    >
    >I maintain that if you remove the glyph shown for latin letter oi
    >(considered only as informative and not mandatory in any of its aspects),
    >and just keep its normative name, then many people will think that the
    >encoded character really represents a letter named or pronounced "oi". Which
    >is completely wrong in our case. But would allow people to use the assigned
    >code point to represent the L-shaped character "i with lower-right hook"...
    >
    >
    >
    Which would be an extremely stupid thing to do, even more stupid than
    calling the character OI in the first place. The idea only arose because
    you, Philippe, got confused between two quite different characters which
    were both in the same list which I made.

    But you do seem to have found a real problem with the standard. If the
    character name is not guaranteed to be an accurate means of
    identification of the character, and the glyph is not normative, how can
    I know from the standard that U+01A3 is intended to be this pan-Turkic
    gha, i.e. that that is its fundamental character identity, and that it
    is not in fact a character in some other even more obscure variant Latin
    alphabet which is actually named or pronounced "oi"? Of course the notes
    do help, as does the glyph, but these are not normative.

    Some rather similar issues apply to the Hebrew accents tsinnor/zarqa and
    tsinnorit, for which the character names do not adequately specify the
    fundamental character identity, and the editors of the standard seem to
    have been rather too quick to add officially informative notes which in
    fact impact on fundamental identity.

    -- 
    Peter Kirk
    peter@qaya.org (personal)
    peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
    http://www.qaya.org/
    


    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Jan 03 2004 - 18:52:48 EST