On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 02:20:42PM +0100, Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin wrote: > On 2003.03.05, 07:58, Radovan Garabik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > >> In the Slovak orthography, the lowercase d, l and t are normally written > >> with the 'apostrophe' form of the accent. > > > > but only the printed version, not in handwriting > <...> > > In fact, the apostrophe form is used because there is a lack of > > convenient space to put carons over "tall" letters d,t,l, whereas > > there is no problem with n,e,r. > > In short, just like the allowed accentless capitals in French or the > comma-cedilla in Roumanian, this is a case of technical contraints
Or like using apostrophe for capitals in Italian. > limiting the ideal orthography, lead typesetting and mechanical > typewrinting imposing limitations and suggesting kludges. > > Strange that now, when finnally there are technical and informational > tools to achieve "perfection", this is viewed as a mistake and the old > kludges, made traditional, are seen as correct and prefered to the > idealized forms (nonetheless extant in handwriting). > > Quite a pity. IMHO, "we" should acknowledge that Unicode is not only a > great tool for representing the (up to now) current typographic reality > but also that it opens to the users a new space of typographical and > othographical improvement, allowing emancipation from 200 of technical > constraints. Like, emancipation out of the need to use separate fixed-form letters, and use handwritting-like ligatures and similar instead? :-) (after all, Arabic script never gave up to mechanical typewriting kludges...) Well, IMHO using apostrophe-like forms in Slovak/Czech is more of a beauty than of a technological constrain - "tall" letters just look too ugly when they are extended by yet another diacritics (slovak ĺ U+013A LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH ACUTE is fortunately rather rare letter :-)). FWIW, I am now involved a bit in converting first grammar book in "contemporary" (130 year old) variant of Slovak into electronic format, and the book uses carons everywhere instead of apostrophe-like diacritics. -- ----------------------------------------------------------- | Radovan Garabík http://melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/~garabik/ | | __..--^^^--..__ garabik @ melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk | ----------------------------------------------------------- Antivirus alert: file .signature infected by signature virus. Hi! I'm a signature virus! Copy me into your signature file to help me spread!
