Re: A sign/abbreviation for "magister"

On 2018/10/29 05:42, Michael Everson via Unicode 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. It would not make sense to encode it as M=ͬ or anything else like that, because the “r” is not modifying a dot or a squiggle or an equals sign. The dot or squiggle or equals sign has no meaning at all. And I would not encode it as Mr͇, firstly because it would never render properly and you might as well encode it as Mr. or M:r, and second because in the IPA at least that character indicates an alveolar realization in disordered speech. (Of course it could be used for anything.)

I think this may depend on actual writing practice. In German at least,
it is customary to have dots (periods) at the end of abbreviations, and
using any other symbol, or not using the dot, would be considered an error.

The question of how to encode that dot is fortunately an easy one, but
even if it were not, German-writing people would find a sentence such as
"The dot or ... has no meaning at all." extremely weird. The dot is
there (and in German, has to be there) because it's an abbreviation.

Regards, Martin.
Received on Mon Oct 29 2018 - 01:50:45 CDT