Re: Some questions about Latin diacritics

From: Richard Wordingham (richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com)
Date: Wed Jun 14 2006 - 15:56:57 CDT

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    Philippe Verdy wrote on Wednesday, June 14, 2006 at 12:56 PM

    > Regarding the i-shaped "Haken" phonetic diacritics included in the PDF
    > (for the "hline Offen" and "überoffen" vowel qualifiers), I see them like
    > simple or double dotless i subscripts (their form are very similar to the
    > form of the small i letter under which they are drawn, except that they
    > just lack the top arm, but the resolution of the bitmap is iunsufficient
    > to really decide) which may merit encoding...

    Are we attempting an exact reproduction of the glyphs, or are we looking for
    the correct encoding of texts? The hooks have the semantic of U+031C
    COMBINING LEFT HALF RING BELOW, i.e. more open pronunciation. One needs a
    very good reason to encode them as anything else. In particular, you need
    to be sure that they are not simple 'squiggle below'. The diacritic for
    openness is very variable - in Yoruba it can be a vertical line, or even,
    through the absence of a background in phonetics, a mere dot.

    Karl Pentzlin originally asked

    > 1. Is there any mechanism which causes diacritics of the same
    > combination class to be placed horizontally instead of vertically?

    I think the answer is, 'taste'. I just looked at the Lithuanian section of
    an introduction to Indo-European philology. The accents were written in a
    Western European style (the 'i's were soft-dotted) and even more interesting
    was LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH DOT ABOVE AND ACUTE ACCENT. They were written
    side by side, dot on the left and acute accent on the right, but I would not
    hesitate to encode it as <U+0065, U+0307, U+0301>, even though the
    Lithuanian style seems to call for the acute to be above the dot above.
    It's a matter of style. Therefore I would say that one could simply encode
    the double hook below as <U+031C, U+031C> and lobby for someone to provide a
    font that placed them side-by-side, with one caveat - most fonts would then
    produce a single hook!

    For the two dots below, there is the issue that a vertical arrangement might
    be preferred to distinguish the combination from the breathiness diacritic.
    It therefore seems that you are forced to use the breathiness diacritic
    U+0324 COMBINING DIAERESIS BELOW. Similarly, I would expect a readable
    rendering of <U+0301 U+0301> to stack vertically, simply to distinguish it
    from 030B COMBINING DOUBLE ACUTE ACCENT.

    Richard.



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