Re: Letters d L l and t with caron

From: Tom Emerson (tree@basistech.com)
Date: Wed Oct 24 2001 - 06:54:24 EDT


Asmus Freytag writes:
> And the origin of the word "caron" is shrouded in the mysteries of
> time (and the vagaries of early SC2/WG3 work on naming characters...).
> Neither on-line nor live searches in libraries have ever turned up
> any mention of 'caron' in descriptions of letter forms - other than
> references to 8859, 10646 or Unicode (and their derivatives). We(*) seem
> to have coined a novel word.

FWIW, Robert Bringhurst's "The Elements of Typographic Style, 2nd
Edition" has in part this to say about "caron":

  "An inverted circumflex. It is used on consonants and vowels [...]
   in Croatian, Czech, Lapp, Lithuanian, Slovak, Slovene, Sorbian and
   other scripts. In romanized Thai, the caron indicates a rising
   tone. In romanized Chinese, it is used on vowels to mark the
   retroflexive third tone (falling/rising tone) of standard Mandarin,
   and it is often used in new scripts for Native American
   languages[...]"

Share and enjoy.

    -tree

-- 
Tom Emerson                                          Basis Technology Corp.
Sr. Computational Linguist                         http://www.basistech.com
  "Beware the lollipop of mediocrity: lick it once and you suck forever"



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