From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri Jan 18 2008 - 16:29:38 CST
At 22:59 +0100 2008-01-18, Karl Pentzlin wrote:
>\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.
I disagree. The ogonek, while used in Polish and Lithuanian and
Navajo, has been widely used in Germanic linguistics, for instance in
Old Norse.
>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.
In some fonts. In what way does it contrast with an ogonek, as for
instance, used in Old Norse?
>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.)
I see. I think this is an artefact of a particular font, rather than
a principled difference from the ogonek.
>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.
Actually those two letters have ENTIRELY different and known origins.
The former is two Greek spiriti on atop the other, an the latter is a
z-like squiggle from medieval manuscripts. (Sorry. You're wrong
there.)
You know I tend toward splitting rather than lumping, Karl, but I
don't see that you have made a case here for the unsuitability of the
ogonek for this character. Now it is true that in Germanic
linguistics the ogonek is usually used for nasalization. Have you
considered U+031C COMBINING LEFT HALF RING BELOW (which is used for
open vowels) or indeed U+0345 COMBINING GREEK YPOGEGRAMMENI?
>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.
No, as I said, that would be formally incorrect.
>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).
I have Lepsius here. Have you looked at that?
>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.
I can't see how.
-- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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