From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Jan 05 2008 - 09:40:10 CST
Asmus Freytag
> Sorry, didn't see that you had reached back to the original thread on the
> alembic.
> But that has morphed already once, so it's really time to start a new
> thread...
I've not read the list for about a couple of weeks. So, no I've still not
reached the thread do far. For me "alembic" refers to the French adjective
"alambiqué" which is used to qualify unnecessarily elaborated (complicated?)
justifications of things, just like the tortuous path that vapors of a
distillated alcoholic solution must pass through in the tubes (cucurbit) of
an "alambic" apparatus (in English: a still) in order to freeze and become
liquid. For you, it refers to U+2697...
I just replied to one message after reading several other ones. It was not
clear you were speaking about phonetic symbols, as I saw lots of comments
about special letter forms and glyphs and diacritics for use in the Latin
script.
My opinion is that there are countless of them, and most probably as many as
wellknown authors or kings, before the European orthographies (previously
bound to the regional spellings and dialects) were regulated by the adoption
of printing and publications of books and newspapers that could be
"broadcasted" on large territories for reading by lot more people, and used
in the public education systems. (on the opposite, the Academies played a
much smaller role into fixing the orthographies, they worked by adopting
some more common usages).
So almost every source of texts before the 18th century will exhibit local
variants, and even after this threshold date, many authors (or traditional
work corporations) will still have their own ligatures (or shorthands?) in
their manuscripts.
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