Re: polytonic Greek: diacritics above long vowels á¾±, á¿‘, á¿¡

On Sun, 4 Aug 2013 22:32:38 +0200
Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr> wrote:

> 2013/8/4 Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham_at_ntlworld.com>
 
> > Also missing are precomposed forms for the likes of <OMICRON,
> > COMBINING DOUBLE BREVE, UPSILON>, described as a final diphthong
> > shortened before a following vowel.

> They are not missing, they are encoded just the way you write it.

They are missing from the set of precomposed characters. (It's been
argued that, in an ideal world, *all* precomposed characters would be
missing.)

> They are not needed in fact, but they just should be documented
> somewhere for implementers of renderers and fonts, to support these
> types of clusters.

Assuming that fonts containing COMBINING DOUBLE BREVE are not required
or morally obliged to support it properly.

> May be it will be enough to include them somewhere in CLDR data
> (notably if they are still not listed explicitly in the Greek
> collation table),

The CLDR does not yet support Ancient Greek! It's by no means certain
that COMBINING DOUBLE BREVE would make it to the list of auxiliary
exemplar characters. Vowels with plain COMBINING BREVE and COMBINING
MACRON don't make to the list of auxiliary exemplar characters for
Modern Greek.

> or in an informative technical report for the Greek
> script, enumerating more completely the clusters that should be
> supported and listing some known practices and recommanded encodings
> (possibly with exceptions for some usages discussed in the report).

> I suggest an informative technical report instead of extending The
> Unicode standard itself, only because it will not be normative, and
> will be subject to updates. And the same could be developed for other
> scripts as well (notably for Semitic and Indic scripts).

On the contrary, a simple remark in TUS Section 7.9 (precise location is
an exercise for editors who like to make it difficult to cite) that
diacritics over two base characters are not limited to the Latin
script should suffice. It's covered by 'pronunciation systems' in TUS
6.2 - they're not limited to the Latin script. I did notice some cases
of ties apparently being used in annotated Greek to indicate that a
sequence of consonants counted as a single character for metrical
purposes.
 
Richard.
Received on Sun Aug 04 2013 - 17:02:29 CDT