John Hudson wrote:
I'll have to look closely at samples again, but it seems to me that the accent marks are not pointing and thus not combining marks (though the vowel points of course are combining marks). They appear to be used more as punctuation than as letter-diacriticals.
Do you mean that they are spacing characters?
I do mean that. We'll have to take a close look at texts, but it is my recollection that they are spacing punctuation marks and not combining diacritics.
(I suppose there could be a fuzzy line between those. What do you say about a mark that always appears at the end of a word kinda over-and-to-the-left of the last letter? Like, say, Zarqa in Masoretic Hebrew? Is it a spacing character after the word or a mark on the letter? In the case of Zarqa, it's clearly a combining mark on the letter, based on other accents, printing, and general perception through the years. But in general?)
~mark
