Re: A sign/abbreviation for "magister"

On Sun, Oct 28 2018 at 20:42 GMT, Michael Everson wrote:
> This is no different the Irish name McCoy which can be written MᶜCoy
> where the raising of the c is actually just decorative, though perhaps
> it was once an abbreviation for Mac. In some styles you can see a line
> or a dot under the raised c. This is purely decorative.
>
> I would encode this as Mʳ if you wanted to make sure your data
> contained the abbreviation mark.
[...]

> The squiggle in your sample, Janusz, does not indicate anything; it is
> only a decoration, and the abbreviation is the same without it.

I have received off the list even more radical suggestion:

>>> The third and the last question is: how to encode this symbol in
>>> Unicode?
>
> Why would you need to? Its plain text content is adequately
> represented by "Mr"

On Sun, Oct 28 2018 at 23:57 GMT, James Kass wrote:
> The umlauts in the band name "Mötley Crüe" are decorative, yet the
> difference between "Mötley Crüe" and "Motley Crue" is one of
> spelling.  Although the tilde in the place name "Rancho Peñasquitos"
> is *not* decorative, "Rancho Peñasquitos" vs. "Rancho Penasquitos" is
> still a spelling difference.

[...]

> If "Mccoy" vs. "McCoy" vs. "MCCOY" vs. "MC COY" represent spelling
> differences, then so do "McCoy" vs "MᶜCoy".  It's a matter of opinion,
> and opinions often differ.

Well said, but I make the claim stronger; it depends on the purpose of
the encoding and intended applications.

Handwriting recognition (HWR) is no longer just an abstract possibility,
it's a facility present to everybody e.g. in Transkribus
(https://transkribus.eu/) which I actually use for transcribing the
texts of interest. Do you claim that in the ground-truth for HWR the
squiggle and raising doesn't matter?

Best regards

Janusz

-- 
             ,   
Janusz S. Bien
emeryt (emeritus)
https://sites.google.com/view/jsbien