Re: Modifiers from punctuation (was: "Re: How to encode reversed section sign?")

From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Sun Aug 08 2010 - 12:46:53 CDT

  • Next message: Peter Constable: "RE: number padless?"

    On 8 Aug 2010, at 17:56, António MARTINS-Tuválkin wrote:

    > On 2010.08.06, 10:06, Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com> wrote:
    >
    >> Recently I wrote a proposal to encode TOP HALF SECTION SIGN. See
    >> http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3740.pdf
    >
    > It is, as usual, very interesting to read on its own — once more, thank
    > you, Michael!

    You're very welcome. It's nice to know that people enjoy what one has written.

    >>> “Palaeotype”, a pre-IPA phonetic alphabet used by Alexander Ellis in
    >>> his massive and classic four-volume work on early English
    >>> pronunciation, published in 1869. The TURNED COMMA indicates
    >>> nasalization, so (in modern IPA) a⸲ means [ã]. Palaeotype also uses
    >>> the punctuation marks , (COMMA) and ,, (two COMMAs side by side) and .
    >>> (FULL STOP) and ., (FULL STOP and COMMA) and ; (SEMICOLON) for various
    >>> purposes. It is not proposed to re-encode all of these as modifier
    >>> letters;
    >
    > Why not? It is not that there’s not already a large group of “duplicated”
    > modifier letters that were historically hacked as such from punctuation
    > marks, and that is a good thing. We all know why is good to have U+02BC
    > separated from U+2019, or U+02CD from U+005F, and a bunch of others: Word
    > count, insertion point movement, etc.

    Because I knew I could get the two characters I needed that way without a fight. Palaeotype is interesting and important, but it's not really "processed" in the same way that other things are. So accepting that it just uses punctuation in a particular way seems just fine to me.

    There are some other peculiar features of Palaeotype however which I will look into in due course.

    Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Aug 08 2010 - 12:50:39 CDT