From: Andrew C. West (andrewcwest@alumni.princeton.edu)
Date: Tue May 18 2004 - 06:49:15 CDT
On Mon, 17 May 2004 22:59:50 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
>
> It should not. That's what makes Ogham different from standard
> horizontal scripts -- it does have a preferred vertical orientation,
It does ? I thought that the whole point of much of the recent discussion was
the uncertainty of how Ogham should be laid out in vertically formatted text,
such as when embedded in Mongolian or vertical Chinese.
> and because turning it upside-down generates different *characters*,
> you can't violate that.
>
True, if you don't know the directionality of an Ogham text it may be difficult
or impossible to be sure how to read it (for example a bone plaque with an Ogham
inscription unearthed recently in the Outer Hebrides
<http://www.cf.ac.uk/hisar/archaeology/reports/hebrides96/images/ogham.gif> may
read either EIHNE-- or --EQBIE depending upon which end you should start from).
However, if you know the directionality of a line of Ogham text then it does not
matter whether it is "upside-down" or not (what is "upside-down" for Ogham?),
you just read it from start of line to end of line.
I guess what you're saying is that unless you know what the vertical orientation
is you may not know which end to start reading from, and so a fragment of Ogham
embedded in Mongolian may be readable either TTB or BTT, and there is nothing
that explicitly notifies the reader which way is correct.
But what is this preferred vertical orientation of Ogham that you speak of ? Is
it specified in the Unicode Standard ? And if not, should it be ?
Andrew
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