From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Fri May 13 2005 - 11:33:29 CDT
At 13:46 +1100 2005/05/13, Andrey V. Panov wrote:
>In Russian (and other Cyrillic alphabets in former Soviet Union)
>typographic tradition the double-angle quotation marks (guillemotleft and
>guillemotright) usually have shape different from French ones: inner
>angles have less size. Look at attachments. Now for Russian texts are
>used special fonts (typically in CP1251 encoding) with similar glyphs
>instead of ordinary guillemotleft and guillemotright. There is no way to place
>the both variants in an unicode font.
The thing is that Unicode usually include different glyphs if they
have some linguistic differences to communicate. The example I use to
give is the difference between plain and bold "sin": In English, the
meaning does not change, but in math it does. Thus, in Unicode, there
are different math styles ("Math Alphanumeric Symbols"), but none for
English.
Now, to the guillemots. Assume that <<...>> are the Cyrillic
guillemots and that [[...]] are the French guillemots. If I write
[[Russian text]], is the semantic meaning from that different from
<<Russian text>>, assuming the quoted text is the same? The first
case is probably part of a French text, quoting some Russian, and the
second case, some Russian text quoting Russian.
One can capture such differences, say by a computer language that is
able to tell which script, or language, different parts of a text
belongs to. In Unicode, one might add symbols for "begin" and "end"
for indicating stacked environments plus characters for scripts. But
I think that so far, one has decided against that, as far as Unicode
is concerned.
-- Hans Aberg
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