Re: Fwd: Kana and Case (was [totally OT] Unicode terminology)
Ar 15:28 -0800 2000-11-22, scríobh Tex Texin: Which brings up the question, when do we encode the comic book (non-spacing) zig-zaggy-balloon-thingie that goes around the text for pow!, biff#@!, bam%$#!, and shazam! ? Asmus and I are looking into this. Of course there is the question, should the "thought bubble" be unified with the "speech bubble"? Bwahahahahahah. ME Michael Everson ** Everson Gunn Teoranta ** http://www.egt.ie 15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire/Ireland Vox +353 1 478 2597 ** Fax +353 1 478 2597 ** Mob +353 86 807 9169 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Co. Átha Cliath; Éire
RE: [OT] Re: the Ethnologue
Peter Constable wrote: This is a good example of why an enumeration of "languages" based only on written forms (as found in ISO 639) is insufficient for all user needs. Of course ISO 639 is insufficient for *all* user needs - no standard is. And is there actually a remit for ISO 639 to include spoken languages? Another post mentioned that ISO 639 was started for bibliographic purposes. Perhaps ISO 639 should stick to being a standard of codes for written languages and a separate standard (or a new part of ISO 639) should be started for spoken languages. There may just be too many conflicts trying to encode both spoken and written languages in the same standard with one set of codes. Spoken language is not necessarily at all the same thing as written language . There are e.g. plenty of mutually incomprehensible forms of spoken English which might each deserve a code in a standard for spoken languages but probably far fewer mutually incomprehensible varieties of written English. And the varieties of dialects of written English do not map neatly to the varieties of spoken English. The same is true for other written and spoken languages. - Chris
Greek Diacritics Again
Dear all, there's another issue about Greek diacritics I'd like to ask the opinion of the people who are in the know: the question of (monotonic) Greek "TONOS" and (polytonic) Greek "OXIA" and their equivalence. I know this has had a somewhat troublesome history in Unicode. I seem to remember I read in some Unicode document that the Greek "TONOS" could be realized *either* as an acute *or* as a vertical stroke. I can't locate the reference at the moment. Unfortunately I haven't got the book at hand here and I've been searching the website in vain. Is the standard (still) actually saying this, or is my memory failing me? On the other hand, the standard is of course quite unambiguous now about the fact that the two accents are equivalent in principle. All the "Oxia" codepoints in 1fxx are singletons (therefore deprecated?) and canonically map to the corresponding "tonos" codepoints in 03xx. Would it be fair to sum up the consequences of all this for font design in the following way: If a font is designed for use with both monotonic and polytonic Greek, then the "tonos" glyphs should *definitely* look like acutes. If a font is designed for monotonic Greek only, a font designer can choose to use either acutes or verticals (or any other shape, for that matter: decorative typefaces in Greece are apparently using all sorts of things from wedges to dots or squares...) But can you think of any good reason for a font to have different (default) glyphs for the "tonos" and for the "oxia" characters side by side? Lukas Pietsch Ferdinand-Kopf-Str. 11 D-79117 Freiburg Tel. 0761-696 37 23 Universität Freiburg Englisches Seminar
Re: Greek Diacritics Again
Lukas Pietsch wrote: I seem to remember I read in some Unicode document that the Greek "TONOS" could be realized *either* as an acute *or* as a vertical stroke. I can't locate the reference at the moment. Unfortunately I haven't got the book at hand here and I've been searching the website in vain. Is the standard (still) actually saying this, or is my memory failing me? Would it be fair to sum up the consequences of all this for font design in the following way: If a font is designed for use with both monotonic and polytonic Greek, then the "tonos" glyphs should *definitely* look like acutes. If a font is designed for monotonic Greek only, a font designer can choose to use either acutes or verticals (or any other shape, for that matter: decorative typefaces in Greece are apparently using all sorts of things from wedges to dots or squares...) Gerry Leonidas at the University of Reading is my usual contact for matters pertaining to Greek type and typography. He is explicit that the correct form of the tonos is _not_ vertical: it should always lean to the right, although usually much less than many acute accents. The vertical form was a brief fashion in Greek graphic design following the official adoption of monotonic, which coincided with a fashion for Greek fonts that aped Latin modernist types (e.g. Helvetica Greek, now widely regarded as a mistake). The vertical tonos seems to have been largely abandoned in favour of the traditional, slanted form advocated by Gerry and his colleagues in Greece. John Hudson Tiro Typeworks | Vancouver, BC | All empty souls tend to extreme opinion. www.tiro.com | W.B. Yeats [EMAIL PROTECTED]|
Re: Information about curly-tailed phonetic letters
Hi everyone, This paper, brought to your attention last June http://stedt.berkeley.edu/pdf/curly-tailed-tdnlcz.pdf http://stedt.berkeley.edu/pdf/TranscriptionTable-WUZongji.jpg has been updated recently. Still working on getting the formal proposal together, and still welcoming comments and/or suggestions. Best, Richard Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2000 14:48:09 -0800 (GMT-0800) Kenneth Whistler wrote: Richard S. Cook, of the STEDT Project at the University of California, Berkeley, passes on the following URL's, which contain documentation regarding the use of curly-tailed phonetic letters in the Sinological and Sino-Tibetan traditions. --Ken Hi there, You may recall that we (on the Unicode list and elsewhere) discussed the issue of certain phonetic transcription characters and their possible inclusion in the Unicode standard. Here is a copy of a paper that I prepared some time ago on this subject. old URL's deleted I welcome any comments or suggestions, and please feel free to pass these URL's on to the Unicode list, as I am currently not subscribed. Best, Richard Richard S. COOK, Jr. STEDT Project, Linguistics Department University of California, Berkeley mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://stedt.berkeley.edu/
