Peter Kirk wrote:
On 14/07/2004 18:40, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
Can you show a pre-existing ISO character encoding standard, such
as ISO 5429, for which there are bibliographic implementations
whose conversion to Unicode is blocked by an encoding distinction
not maintained in Unicode for these particular cases? ...
No, but I can show a pre-existing clearly defined encoding, see
http://wts.edu/hebrew/whmcodemanual.html dated 1982, especially point 1
"We now distinguish holem waw (`OW') from waw followed by holem", i.e.
Holam Male from Vav Haluma, and point 2 re the three variants of Meteg.
Texts based on these encodings have been in the public domain and
circulated widely since 1982, and are available from such repositories
as CCAT and the Oxford Text Archive. Conversion of these texts to
Unicode is blocked by the current failure of Unicode to distinguish
Holam Male from Vav Haluma and to distinguish three poisitions of Meteg.
I am not sure about the relevance of the Meteg problem, but I do know
about a case, where different relative positions of the same
diacriticals are used for conveying a semantic distinction. In a big
reference work about verse metrics in the world's languages (Erika
Szepes - István Szerdahelyi: Verstan, published by Gondolat, Budapest,
1981), when discussing quantitative metrics, a macron above a breve is
used for denoting a neutral syllable of the metrical pattern that is
more frequently filled in by a short syllable than by a long one and
a breve above a macron is used for the reverse, i.e. the difference in
the combinations provides statistical information.
Actually, these signs are typically (although not inevitably) spacing
characters, but I don't think it makes a significant difference in this
perspective.
Regards,
bushmanush
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