From: Ernest Cline (ernestcline@mindspring.com)
Date: Sat Mar 06 2004 - 11:15:16 EST
I thought Unicode was supposed to encode characters and not glyphs.
I was originally asking for a change in the name, but after this discussion
I'm going to change my opinion. LATIN SMALL LETTER TH WITH
STRIKETHROUGH has not been shown to be anything other than
a Private Use character used by certain makers of dictionaries to
represent a voiced th. No evidence has been provided for any other
use. Evidence has been produced that other dictionary publishers
use other typographic conventions to represent the same concept in
American English dictionaries. Barring new evidence, I think that
LATIN SMALL LETTER TH WITH STRIKETHROUGH does not
meet the guidelines of Annex H of the Principles and Procedures.
Why? First of all, let me say that it does come close to meeting them,
but not quite. First off, there is no demonstrated community of users
that would instantly recognize this glyph and say, "I know what that
is supposed to mean." (H.6 Point 1) Indeed, as Peter Kirk said:
> there could well be a dictionary out there somewhere which uses
> one of your supposedly equivalent ligatures for the voiced th and
>another one for the unvoiced th.
That argument not only convinced me against the unification
I proposed, it convinces me that this character truly belongs as
a private use character. It has no well defined semantics.
(H.6 Point 8) and no evidence that it is widespread. (H.6 Point 14).
These are but some of the reasons for encoding a character that
this proposed character not only fails to meet affirmatively, It
resoundingly contradicts. On the other hand it does meet some
of the criteria for encoding. At this point while I think encoding it
would be a mistake, it would not be the first that Unicode has made,
nor will it prove to be one of the major ones.
(As an aside, let me ask if instead of encoding this one character,
whether any thought was given to encoding a new double diacritic:
instead COMBINING DOUBLE STRIKETHROUGH. Such a
diacritic could also serve for several of the other attested
dictionary usages shown in N2656.)
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