For the case of medieval texts, the change of appearance of these symbols (with shorter legs), just needs to be considered as a font variant, which would be in sync with the change of appearance of glyphs for letters in the mediaval text.
If someone reproduces the mediaval text with (say) a "Arial Unicode"
font, that will display long legs for ceiling brackets, it won't be
wrong
given that the narrow sans-serif style was actually never used for
letters in medieval text.
Medieval texts and transliterations of cuneiform text are almost always printed using modern fonts in modern style.
The original appearance of the text is not an issue (especially with cuneiform). The text is represented in a modern font.
Regular square brackets are used to enclose editorial commentary. The upper-half square brackets are often used to enclose editorial surmised replacement of text missing because of damage to the original. This may be a single character or several lines of text (which one may be able to fill in approximately from another manuscript or tablet containing approximately the same text).
They are sometimes used again in translations of such texts.
Using similar characters for the upper-half square brackets would be as tyopgraphically abnormal as using << and >> or “ and ” instead of « and » for quotation marks in French.
Neither is *wrong* if the proper characters are not available or someone who knows the typographical issues decides purposely to substitute other characters.
As far as I can tell the ceiling brackets and the upper-half square brackets were created separately for different disciplines. They also have different meanings.
Characters of different origin, different meaning and different appearance are not usually considered to be style variants that should be selected by changing a font.
Jim Allan
