Re: Cyrillic guillemotleft and guillemotright

From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Fri May 13 2005 - 11:33:29 CDT

  • Next message: John H. Jenkins: "Re: Cyrillic guillemotleft and guillemotright"

    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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