From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Thu Jun 10 2004 - 15:07:09 CDT
At 12:50 -0700 2004-06-10, Asmus Freytag wrote:
>That's a statement, not an argument. Nor does it address my
>contention that the phonetic extensions (all of them) that are
>styled Latin characters are in fact equivalent to mathematical usage
>in that in both cases you have a letter form that carries specific
>semantics based on what otherwise would be font style.
"Style" per se is applied to Mathematical characters, regularly, and
meaningfully. Just because "script" is part of the name of U+0261
does not mean that "style" as in HTML markup is what makes it look
like that; that's just not the case, and you can't read that much
into the name. It is for the same reason that I chose the name
"script" when ***I*** named the voiced palatoalveolar click. I
recognized its shape as similar to some forms of script Q. There are
other forms of script Q. I did not consider it to be "styled" in the
same way.
By the way, I *made* the glyph out of U+0541 ARMENIAN LETTER JA, andd
it looks a lot more like that than a script Q, so PLEEEAASE let's not
jump overboard on a crusade to unify this character with a
mathematical character, OK? To do so would be really very silly.
>>I disagree. Leave the math characters, please, to the math fonts.
>>For instance, the flowery style we use now for the math block is
>>waaaay to italic for harmonization with the use of the character in
>>a phonetic context.
>
>This is a glyphic argument that doesn't hold water. The font you use
>is well within the range of 'script' fonts that can be used for
>mathematical use. In fact our font is not even the best script font
>of that purpose.
I'm aware of that; I still do not think we should start encouraging
linguists to go off into the mathematical characters and press them
into service for phonetics. Letters are letters.
>There is nothing magically different about mathematical usage.
>Mathematicians will be happy to use any of the existing phonetic
>letters if and when the fancy strikes them. Now that Unicode is
>widespread I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't any
>mathematicians already spelunking...
Mathematicians can do what they like.
>That's an argument of convenience. The BMP will be full at some
>point in the very near future, and then there will be no choice.
>Opening the door for a historic extension makes a more sense than
>for a commonly used modern orthography.
There is no value to unifying this with the maths character just
because *I* named it that way for reasons which you misconstrue.
>>I will be perfectly happy to rename the character LATIN LETTER
>>VOICED PALATOAVEOLAR CLICK. It doesn't have an upper case property
>>anyway.
>
>That's just hiding the issue.
No, it's not. There is nothing particularly Q-like about the
character in question; it's more JA-like anyway. It was a superficial
identification I made; had I simply named it VOICED PALATOAVEOLAR
CLICK, we would probably not be having this conversation.
>>In any case -- and I think this is the precedent I am looking for
>>-- this is a "script" capital Q in the same way that U+0261 is a
>>script g. It is **not** unified with U+210A SCRIPT SMALL G.
>
>It's not a precedent, since the use of the word 'script' has
>different meaning in both cases.
No, it doesn't. Your mathematical "script" has a meaning which is
different from the one which applies to the IPA [g] and from the one
I had in mind when I named the character.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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