From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Fri Mar 05 2004 - 19:57:08 EST
> but that does not affect the point that I made that there are at least
> three different variants that have been used in American English
> dictionaries of the same basic concept, representing a voiced
> th in a manner that is readable as a plain text th if one ignores
> the typographic cruft.
>
> TH WITH STRIKETHROUGH
> ITALIC TH LIGATED BY HOOK
> PLAIN TH LIGATED BY CROSSBAR
Yes, we know that.
>
> three separate glyphic representations of the same character
>
> LEXICOGRAPHIC VOICED TH
Here is the problem. This is not a *character*. It is a phoneme
of English, relevant to the lexicography of English.
>
> found in printed American English dictionaries that are designed
> to be readable as th, but typographically set apart to indicate
> how the word is to be pronounced
> Now if one were to take a dictionary that used any one of those
> three forms mentioned above and consistently replaced one
> glyph with another throughout the dictionary, would there truly
> be any difference in the text?
Yes, there would be. Because the text would not be presented
correctly for that dictionary's conventions. It is a presentational
distinction, admittedly, rather than a "semantic" distinction
in the intended pronunciation represented, but it would,
nonetheless, be considered an error in textual representation.
The only real question here is whether:
TH WITH STRIKETHROUGH
PLAIN TH LIGATED BY CROSSBAR
as you designated them, are two different glyphs of one encoded
character:
1D7A LATIN SMALL LETTER TH WITH STRIKETHROUGH
(in which case you'd need style and/or font distinctions to
get the correct glyph used for particular dictionaries)
or whether they are two different glyphs, one each for two
encoded characters:
1D7A LATIN SMALL LETTER TH WITH STRIKETHROUGH
1DXX LATIN SMALL LETTER TH WITH STROKE
(in which case you don't need font distinctions to get the
correct glyph used for particular dictionaries).
The italic form can be dealt with by ligation control on
italic styled text using simply a <t, h> sequence.
The UTC chose the first solution, at least for the moment.
> If you can point out how that
> would be the case, I'll gladly concede the point.
>
> As for the name used for this character, I don't really have
> a preference as long as it does not lock in one specific
> glyph.
With very few exceptions (the Zapf dingbats), *no* Unicode
character ever "lock[s] in one specific glyph". Unicode is
a character encoding standard -- the particular presentation
forms that the glyphs take is a matter of font design and
other factors.
--Ken
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