Peter quoted me: > As far as I know, the same completeness issue does not apply for the > retroflex and palatal hooks -- so for those, use of the preformed > base letters is probably the better recommendation, rather than use > of the non-spacing diacritics together with ligature tables in the fonts. > </quote> > > and > > Michael Everson wrote on 2002-10-16: > > <quote> > All of these things should be encoded as things-without-diacritics, > as unitary characters. > </quote>
And me again: > <quote> > My suggestion is just to bring in a proposal [for palatal-hook characters.] > And name them all consistently > as ...WITH PALATAL HOOK, to be consistent with U+01AB... > > Given the fact that a precomposed palatal hook precedent exists, and that > all the retroflex hook forms also got encoded -- all with no > explicit decompositions, this way seems most consistent. I still think that is the most consistent way to deal with some set of Latin letters with palatal hooks. However, I would like to see indication, for the list that Peter is assembling, that these are, indeed, in some established orthographic practice, rather than being one-off's or manuscript phonetic transcription practice. For the list of palatalized entities that Peter showed, much more widespread is the practice of using modifier letters: U+02B2 for IPA, U+02B8 for Americanists, U+02B9 (or U+0301) for Slavicists, etc. Creating palatal-hook v's, x's, k's, s's, and so on if they are not in significant use and when multiple, equally accurate, alternative representations are available, may not be the best thing to do. > BTW, Ken, not too long ago we talked about overlaid-tilde typeforms, and > you wanted to use the combining overlay in that case, but it seems to me > that the same argument of inability to have generic application by rule > applies in those cases. But I don't yet have what I'd consider good enough > evidence for proposing a set of tilde-overlaid forms. There is a good reason why technical transcriptional orthographies don't tend to make generic use of overlaid diacritics. They just aren't easy to use or very effective as diacritics. --Ken
