Re: String name and Character Name

From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Tue Apr 12 2005 - 12:42:46 CST

  • Next message: Peter Kirk: "Re: String name and Character Name"

    On 12/04/2005 08:04, John Hudson wrote:

    > ...
    > The fact that names were originally assigned to be meaningful does not
    > mean that individual names remain 'full of meaning'. The Latvian
    > letters to which I referred earlier, which Unicode names identify as
    > being 'WITH CEDILLA', are again a good example: yes, these names were
    > originally assigned in the belief that they had a meaningful
    > relationship to the identity of these letters. As it turns out, they
    > were misnamed, because the mark below these letters is not a cedilla.
    > As far as I'm concerned, this means that these particular names are
    > not meaningful, because they do not accurately reflect the identity of
    > the letters. This doesn't mean that they were not intended to be
    > meaningful, but I reckon meaningfulness in terms of usefulness in
    > describing reality. Since the name 'WITH CEDILLA' does not describe
    > the real identity of these letters, the name cannot be said to be
    > either useful or meaningful. The same is, regretably, true of the
    > Tamil aytham: the name assigned by Unicode is incorrect and hence
    > meaingless as an means of describing the actual identity of this
    > character.
    >
    John, you asked separately why these names should be deprecated. And
    surely you have answered the question. These names are incorrect, do not
    describe the real identity of the characters, are meaningless and
    useless. So best to deprecate them entirely, and replace them with a
    list of meaningful names - which can be changed, both to correct errors
    and because names may actually change with time. Most of this new list
    would be identical with the old list. But a complete new list would be
    much clearer and more useful to end users than the original list plus a
    separate set of corrigenda - and all the more so if the corrigenda are
    not actually formatted as alternate character names.

    -- 
    Peter Kirk
    peter@qaya.org (personal)
    peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
    http://www.qaya.org/
    


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