Re: Punctuation character (inverted interrobang) proposed

From: Denis Jacquerye (moyogo@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Oct 19 2005 - 17:33:10 CST

  • Next message: David Starner: "Re: Punctuation character (inverted interrobang) proposed"

    When I was questioning if U+0254, 025C, 0186 and U+0190 could be
    precomposed with acute, grave, circumflex or caron a few month ago on
    Unicode-Afrique. People notorious on this list replied it would simply
    be impossible, because of the proposal guidelines.
    From the proposal guidelines :
    Often a proposed character can be expressed as a sequence of one or
    more existing Unicode characters. Encoding the proposed character
    would be a duplicate representation, and is thus not suitable for
    encoding.

    Isn't inverted interrobang simply the sequence U+00BF + U+00A1 ?

    Even if inverted interrobang is an abbreviation, by following the
    guidelines it should not be accepted. Fonts designers can deal with it
    the way they want.
    If Spanish or any other language needs a character, then that
    character can only be added if it is not a sequence of already
    existing characters, at least that's what I've been told and what the
    guidelines say.

    If inverted interrobang were to be accepted, why shouldn't accented
    African vowels be included,? Why shouldn't any useful sequence of
    characters in living languages be included? Especially since many
    occur at very high frequency in their languages, and since most
    systems and fonts are currently unable to provide any good support for
    composed characters (with diacritics).

    On 10/19/05, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
    > I also admit that the interrobang looks like an abbreviation for denoting
    > several missing words (or a completely missing sentence), so it's true it
    > can't be considered purely as a grammatical puntuation. Most uses of the
    > character I saw were in isolated forms (for example in comics bubbles), but
    > it can't be used to correctly represent the oral language.
    >
    > This character should better be a ideographic symbol, that effectively
    > escapes the normal grammatical rules when it is used in a sentence (so no
    > need of an inverted form for Spanish, as it is not grammatically correct in
    > Spanish either).
    >
    > From: "Marion Gunn" <mgunn@egt.ie>
    > >I have to agree with what John says below.
    > > mg
    > >
    > > Scríobh John Hudson:
    > >> ...
    > >> I have no major objection to the existence and use of the interrobang in
    > >> this expressive
    > >> way, and more than I object to Japanese schoolgirls dotting their i's
    > >> with hearts. What
    > >> I'm objecting to is the claim that it is a 'punctuation mark', which
    > >> implies a grammatical
    > >> function. Insofar as the interrobang confuses the two distinct
    > >> grammatical constructions
    > >> normally distinguished by the question and exclamation marks, one could
    > >> call it an
    > >> anti-punctuation mark; it actually diminishes the grammatical information
    > >> available to the
    > >> reader.
    >
    >
    >
    >

    --
    Denis Moyogo Jacquerye --- http://home.sus.mcgill.ca/~moyogo
    


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