Antoine Leca l'ha scrivùu:
> Marco Cimarosti va escriure:
> > I am considering to file in a proposal for two new
> characters, to be used in
> > Italian ordinal numbers abbreviations.
> [...]
> Here they are...
> [...]
> Well, the same phenomena occurs in several Romance (or
> perhaps European)
> languages. I am well aware (for quite obvious reasons) of the
> situation
> with French, Catalan and Valencian (one of the few areas where the two
> latter differ), but I think one can encounter the same point in other
> languages.
Gràcies: I was nearly getting disappointed! I expected to receive this
objection in multiple copies just minutes after I sent my original message.
(But this UTF-8S thing is really draining up the attention of the whole list
;-)
I think that this is a very serious objection, and I reckon that the
arguments I can oppose are probably not as strong.
> In French, we have
> FIRST SECOND, THIRD ETC.
> sing. masc. 1er 2e, 3e
> sing. fem. 1re 2e, 3e
> plur. masc. 1ers 2es, 3es
> plur. fem. 1res 2es, 3es
The point is that encodings currently used for French have none of these.
On the other hand, for historical reasons, Italian has an incomplete set
including only singular forms (augmented, starting from Unicode 3.2, of a
possible masculine plural form).
Standing this situation, it makes sense to spend a single code point to
complete the set with the missing feminine plural form. This can makes life
easier to users who assumed that if "o", "a", and "i" are available, also
"e" should be somewhere.
The second point regarding French is that, AFAIK, these abbreviations are
also written with normal (non superscript) letters, as you have written them
in your mail.
So my question is: is the superscript attribute essential in French to
understand these abbreviations (as it is in Italian), or is it desirable but
optional (as it is in English)?
> Of course, all the letters are superscripts. So this add "r" and "s"
> to your list.
> Also, a large number of people (incorrectly) believe the form
> for second,
> third etc. is "2ème" rather than "2e" (in fact, if you look
> at examples
> in France, you will find about 75% of 2ème versus 25% of 2e...).
> This begs for additional "m" and "è" (U+00E0).
I think I have seen 2nd, 3rd etc. written as "2me", "3me" etc.
If this is true, and if your answer at the question above was "yes", this
could start to look like a pattern: languages (such as English) which
abbreviate ordinals writing 2 or more final letters can do without the
superscript attribute; on the other hand languages (such as Italian) which
only use the last final letter need the superscript attribute.
> In Catalan, as in Spanish or Italian, there is completely
> different series
> for masculine and feminine forms. Feminine is simply enough,
> always "a"
> in singular and "es" in plural, so it does not add anything.
>
> Masculine is more complex, as the full forms of the adjective
> differ in
> the finals... So we have the singular forms 1r (primer), 2n (segon),
> 3r (tercer), 4t (quart), 5è (cinquè), but 5é (cinqué) in Valencian,
> 6è/6é (sissè/sissé), etc. (similar to English, further forms all end
> with è or é, according to the language). This will add "n"
> (but still here,
> as U+207F), "t" and "è" for Catalan.
> Plurals are 1rs, 2ns, 3rs, 4ts, 5ns (cinquens is the plural form, a
> euphonical "n" is added), etc. This add no new character (:-)).
> [...]
> So you should consider also "m", "r", "s", "t", "è" (U+00E0)
> and "é" (U+00E1).
As I said above for French. The whole Catalan set is missing (apart the
casual "n", not in Latin 1), so does it make sense to add it?
It is less likely that someone got used to write only "2n" and, suddenly,
finds herself at odds when having to write "1r" or "4t".
(BTW, if Lombard had an important written tradition as Catalan has, it would
probably require even a bigger set of letters: prim=1m, second=2d, tèrs=3s,
quart=4t, quint=5t, sèst=6t, otaf=8f, nòno=9o, décim=10m, etc...).
> Looks like a bit too much to me.
To me too. I would rather drop my proposal that see it proliferate.
The ideal for me, rather than adding the missing "e" and "i", would be to
delete the existing "a" and "o". But this is not possible, so the reason of
my proposal is to make this embarrassing inheritance more tolerable, not to
exacerbate it).
> The real point is why are "ª" and "º" already there. My own
> idea is that they
> come here because at a past point in time, there were some
> "free" place on
> Spanish keyboard layout for some kind of typewriters, and
> this space was used
> for these two "characters". On the other hand, French and
> Italian did not
> enjoy such free space (perhaps because of the biggest sets
> needed), so no
> engineers did have such an idea on this side of the Pyrennean
> mountains.
I totally agree. It is only because of the historical precedent of "ª" and
"º" (from Latin-1) that the "need" for the plural forms may be felt in
Italian.
If these two freaks were not there, people would not even think that the
same letter could have different codes only because of a font variation.
Italians would simply have used the superscript property to encode these
forms. And, when superscript was not available, they would have got used to
forms like "3o", "4a".
> One should also notice that even in Spanish, there is exactly the same
> problem as Marco pointed out: the plural forms are 1ºs and
> 2ªs (primeros and segondas), with superscripts "s"...
The Spanish (and Portuguese?) case is on the same ground as the Italian one.
Or even at a higher priority, as "ª" and "º" were probably included in
Latin-1 more for Spanish than for Italian.
If fact, I am still considering whether to include a superscript "s" in my
proposal.
Then, I preferred not to venture on the ground languages that I don't know
well enough. Moreover, talking about a single language, I hoped to avoid the
"my-language-too" effect.
> And about the use: I believe French has the widely used form, since we
> are customary writing the date with superscript "er" when the
> day is the
> first of a month: so ten days ago was "vendredi
> 1<SUPER>er</SUPER> juin".
That's also true in Italian: "1º giugno 2001" (but we can write it in plain
text, aha ;-)
_ Marco
