From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Mon Jan 22 2007 - 13:16:44 CST
On 1/22/2007 10:31 AM, Jon Hanna wrote:
> Asmus Freytag wrote:
>> (The Wikipedia article at "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arno_Schmidt"
>> might be illuminating).
>>
>> Arno Schmidt is associated with his orthography in German literature
>> the way e.e.cummings is associated in American literature with the
>> use of lowercase.
>
> E. E. Cummings' use of lower case is regularly overstated or
> mis-stated (the idea that he used the lower case for his own name
> being a mis-statement), but that aside this description makes it seem
> like it was idiosyncratic.
>
> If it's idiosyncratic the private use area should be put to use.
His use of this may have been idiosyncratic originally, but the use of
it in studies of his work is not. All notation is originally
idiosyncratic. Nobody argues that this is a case of a mainstream
character, it's more in line with the symbols and letters we've added
for specialized notations in mathematics and linguistics, or, more
recently, the editing of archaic texts.
Add to that the suspicion, if you will, that if double hyphens show up
in Schmidt, in Katakana contexts and possibly elsewhere, that there is
something generic to the concept of doubling a hyphen to make a
notational point.
What had been missing was an understanding of the difference between a
double hyphen *character* and a double hyphen *glyph*. This is mainly,
but not exclusively due to Fraktur, where the type style demands a
double stroke glyph.
As we have learned since, not least for the case of the double oblique
hyphen, there are cases where these have been used in distinction to
ordinary hyphens, making clear that what is intended in those cases is a
*character* difference.
With the three rules I proposed in my posting, it's now possible to
decide when to use a font and when to use a character difference. As the
standard case is the standard hyphen and 99% of people don't need to
worry about the alternatives, the confusion problem is absent for
ordinary users. Specialists will need to make decisions how to edit
their texts, but having to think about which character to use is less of
a problem than not having the right character. Pushing people into
substituting = because it's the only thing that looks close is just wrong.
A./
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