Re: Letters d L l and t with caron

From: G. Adam Stanislav (adam@whizkidtech.net)
Date: Tue Oct 23 2001 - 18:11:30 EDT


At 11:35 2001-10-23 -0700, John Hudson wrote:
>The apostrophe form (carka, I believe) is the preferred form for both the
>upper and lowercase L. I have seen Slovak texts that use the regular
>caron/hacek form for the uppercase L, but most display the apostrophe form.
>I agree that a note would be handy.

Save for calling it "carka" you are correct. Slovak texts always prefer
the "apostrophe" form for d, t, l, and L. We only use the other form
(the one that looks like a raised v) when we use typewriters that do not
have the "apostrophe" form but do have the caron, or when we write by
hand (it somehow seems easier to write the little v than the "apostrophe").

I have put the word "apostrophe" to quotation marks because it is not
an apostrophe. It looks like an apostrophe but is much closer to the
letter it modifies. In a font in which all characters are of the same
width an Lcaron will be the width of one character, while L apostrophe
will be the width of two characters.

Used with other characters, it is always the little raised v.

At any rate, these are typographical conventions. Printed either way
the meaning is the same: It softens the letter it modifies, e.g.,
ncaron is pronounced the same as Spanish ntilde.

BTW, the Slovak name of caron is "makcen" (with two dots over the a,
and caron over the c and n). It literally means softener. The word
"hacek" used by Unicode is a Czech word (with an acute over the a
and a caron over the c) and means little hook which refers to the v
shaped one variety only (while makcen refers to either as it
describes its function, not its looks).

Adam
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