Re: Proposal to encode three combining diacritical marks for Low German dialect writing

From: Karl Pentzlin (karl-pentzlin@acssoft.de)
Date: Fri Jan 18 2008 - 15:59:25 CST

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    Am Freitag, 18. Januar 2008 um 21:29 schrieb Michael Everson:

    ME> At 19:29 +0100 2008-01-18, Karl Pentzlin wrote:
    >>I am preparing a "Proposal to encode three combining diacritical
    >>marks for Low German dialect writing".
    >>You find the actual draft:
    >>http://www.europatastatur.de/material/ThreeMarks-2008-01-16.pdf

    ME> I could argue for the acceptance of the COMBINING TRIPLE BREVE BELOW,
    ME> but the other two characters are in my opinion no different from
    ME> COMBINING OGONEK and COMBINING VERTICAL LINE BELOW.

    Regarding the proposed COMBINING STRAIGHT RIGHT-POINTING HOOK BELOW
    and its similarity to the existing U+0238 COMBINING OGONEK, the
    similarity is only very superficial. The proposed character has a
    straight vertical stem and attaches to the center or something left of
    the center of its base character. Thus, it has the general shape of a
    Greek small iota.
    On the other side, the stem of the ogonek is slanted or bent to the
    upper right, and attaches to the right of its base character.
    (see attacted picture.)

    These characters are at least as different as U+A722 LATIN CAPITAL
    LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL ALEF and U+A76A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ET (both
    from FPDAM3, i.e. Unicode 5.1), which are also superficially similar,
    and which will hardly appear side by side in a "real life" text
    document. Thus it would have been no problem to encode these as a
    single character *LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THREE-LIKE THINGIE, based on
    their appearance alone.

    The proposed hook has a history (it is used by its community at least
    since the first half of the 20th century; I am still trying to collect
    scans of that era for inclusion in my proposal). Thus, it has an
    identity as a character (as U+A722 and U+A76A have).

    The proposed COMBINING LONG VERTICAL LINE BELOW is admittedly a border
    case, although it is not pure obvious to equate it with the existing
    U+0329 COMBINING VERTICAL LINE BELOW. It also may have an identity
    as a character, rather than being a glyph variant only.

    - Karl Pentzlin


    o-hook--o-ogonek.png

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