2012-08-14 22:56, Robert Wheelock wrote:
The _tonos_ (overtick) is a STRAIGHT 90º accent mark, whereas the _oxeia_ (acute) is usually slanted at 45º.
It is somewhat tragicomic that you make the mistake of using masculine ordinal indicator U+00BA in place of the degree sign U+00B0, when making a point on other distinctions that are often missed. And I’m afraid your description of the difference is somewhat exaggerated.
Anyway, the tonos, the oxia (oxeia), and the acute accent have been unified, and it’s too late to change this. The distinction between them is, within the Unicode context, a stylistic issue. You can try to make rendering software vary the shape of this diacritic by the script of the base character, or by the language of the text. But you cannot make it a character-level difference.
In practice, fonts often have a different diacritic in e.g. e with acute accent (é) than in alpha with tonos (ά), even though both have canonical decompositions with U+0301 combining acute accent. So the difference can be made at the font level.
Yucca
