Re: Latin chi and stretched x

From: Michael Everson <everson_at_evertype.com>
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2012 10:38:39 +0100

On 4 Jun 2012, at 10:04, Denis Jacquerye wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 10:16 AM, Michael Everson <everson_at_evertype.com> wrote:
>> What is your point, though?
>
> Latin stretched x has been accepted based on examples with an Italic glyph like Lepsius' chi, a glyph like Greek chi and a stretched x taller than x-height (and not below baseline). All these are strictly different glyphs.

Teuthonista suffers from a good deal of extraordinarily bad typography, and a fair bit of non-typographic handwritten text (which isn't bad). Where it uses Greek sorts it is because that was what they had, but it is clear from the *family* of stretched x's some with rings and curls that it is an "x" that is being stretched. (And not a chi with

> But Latin chi is being proposed as a different character because IPA has used a different glyph. Why?

Because all, not some, of the IPA "borrowings" from Greek were explicitly stated to be designed to be different from Greek and to harmonize with Latin. The persisting unification doesn't make processing multi-script Greek and Latin text any easier, and ultimately is not what was designed. This is very clear in the beta, which now can be disunified because of its capital, but which should never have been unified in the first place.

> Furthermore, the Latin capital Chi is being proposed based on Lepsius' capital Chi which glyphs are strictly different from that one proposed.

Yes, but it is still essentially a Latin Chi, not a Latin Stretched X. It is clearly not a Greek Chi, because Greek Chi does not use that shape for its capital. Lepsius, and the IPA, explicitly disunified Latin Chi from Greek, and I would say that both Lepsius and IPA glyphs could be taken for glyph variants of Latin Chi. But they are different from what is found in Greek.

> My concern is only with Latin chi being unified with Latin stretched x. The disunification of Latin chi from Greek chi (or the others in the proposal) is a good thing, I just think it has already been done with stretched x given the examples.

As I say, stretched x is in a family of other x's with one or two long feet, which may have rings or hooks on the end of them. But its weight is clearly x-like -- by design. Where Teuthonista texts occasionally used a "proper" Greek chi it is because of typographic deficiency.

>> How do we move forward?
>
> Is there evidence IPA Latin chi is any different from Teuthonista's multiple stretched x? Both use the glyph of Greek chi sometimes, and other glyphs other times.

Stretched x is an x, not anything else. In its origin, they stretched a Latin x. Latin chi is borrowed from Greek chi, but in Lepsius uses a unique capital, and in IPA has a Greek-chi-like weight which differs from the Latin x.

>> The evidence for disunifying beta is clear. That leaves chi and theta. I think that the casing madness involved with Greek theta makes disunification inevitable.
>
> I agree and support disunification.

How shall we proceed? I had hoped to bundle all of this together with Unifon (since Unifon uses the Latin Theta).

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
Received on Mon Jun 04 2012 - 04:40:15 CDT

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