When transcribing poetic meter (scansion
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scansion>), it is common to use two symbols
above the line (usually a breve [U+306 ̆] for stressed syllables and a
solidus
/ slash [U+2F /] for unstressed syllables) to indicate stress patterns. Ex:
̆ / ̆ / ̆ / ̆ / ̆ /
When I consider how my light is spent
(John Milton, On His Blindness)
Other symbols used in place of the breve are a cross / x (U+D8 × or U+78 x)
or
bullet (U+B7 · or U+2022 •).
This approach, however, is problematic; the lack of a combining slash above
character means that two lines of text must be used, and any non-monospaced
font (or any platform where multiple consecutive spaces are truncated into
one
by default, such as HTML) makes keeping the annotations properly aligned
with
the text difficult or impossible — depending on your email client, the above
example may be entirely misaligned. Being able to use combining diacritics
for
scansion would make these problems obsolete and enable a semantic
transcription
of meter.
Would a proposal to add a combining solidus above (and possibly a combining
reversed solidus above to support Hamer, Wright, and Trager-Smith
notations) be
supported?
