From: Marnen Laibow-Koser (marnen@marnen.org)
Date: Fri May 04 2007 - 15:43:43 CST
On May 4, 2007, at 5:20 PM, John Hudson wrote:
> I think it is a testimony to the fundamental illogic of a bicameral
> writing system containing two different lowercase elements being
> mapped to the same uppercase elements. The variation from standard
> orthography persists, despite the evident failure over more than a
> hundred years to affect orthographic reform, because it makes more
> sense than the standard orthography. The ß should have an uppercase
> equivalent. It is crazy that one does not exist.
I agree.
[...]
> The irony of the recent exchanges is not lost on me:
>
> On the one hand, we have Marnen Laibow-Koser, who thinks that this
> character should *not* exist, but that it does, and therefore needs
> to be encoded.
Part of me actually thinks that the character should exist -- after
all, there is a real distinction between ss and ß, which is why we
have uppercase hacks like "MASZE" for "Maße". What I find barbarous
here is the idea of an uppercase letter based on long s, which only
exists in lowercase. On the other hand, scripts are always evolving,
and perhaps the long-s argument substitutes diachronic pedantry for
synchronic necessity. I'm sure the same sorts of things would have
been said about lowercase v and uppercase U a few hundred years ago.
>
> On the other hand, we have me, who thinks that this character
> *should* exist, but that it does not, and therefore does not need
> to be encoded.
>
> John Hudson
Best,
Marnen
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri May 04 2007 - 15:44:45 CST