Ken Whistler wrote,
> It isn't the job of the Unicode Consortium or the Unicode Standard
> to sort that stuff out or to standardize characters to represent it.
Agreed, it isn’t.
> When somebody brings to the UTC written examples of established
> orthographies using character conventions that cannot be clearly
> conveyed in plain text with the Unicode characters we already have,
> *then* perhaps we will have something to talk about.
If a text is published in all italics, that’s style/font choice. If a
text is published using italics and roman contrastively and
consistently, and everybody else is doing it pretty much the same way,
that’s a convention.
Typewriting is mechanical writing. Computer keyboards, input methods,
and Unicode are technological advances in mechanical writing.
Typesetting for publishing is mechanical writing for the purpose of mass
production and distribution of texts.
From a printed Webster’s,
lexicon (lek´ si kən) [ < Gr. 𝑙𝑒𝑥𝑖𝑠, word. ] 1. a dictionary 2.
a special vocabulary
There’s a convention in English writing to express foreign words using
italics. Not just in published dictionaries, but also in running text
where foreign words and phrases are deployed.
Other italics conventions include ship names such as the SS 𝐶𝑎𝑝’𝑠
𝐸𝑦𝑒𝑠, or titles such as 𝐶𝑎 𝑃𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑒 𝑃𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑀𝑜𝑖, which is
properly spelled with a “Ç” in “Ça”. (Math kludge fail.) Of course,
since that song title is in a foreign language, it should be italicized
anyway.
Quoting from,
http://navalmarinearchive.com/research/ship_names.html
“Names of specific ships and other vessels are both capitalized and
italicized (or capitalized entirely - "all caps" - in text documents
denying italics such as email, use of a mechanical typewriter.)”
There were technological constraints denying italics in mechanical
typewriters. There’s a technical consortium denying italics in Latin
computer plain text, for better or worse. (Trying to state the obvious
here without being judgmental.)
The use of italics in English writing to mark stress is another existing
convention. Italics don’t interfere with legibility in English fiction
when used to indicate stress in dialogue between the characters.
Rather, the italics add information enabling the reader to approximate
how the author intended the dialogue to be *spoken*. And 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡
information cannot be preserved in Unicode plain text without the math
kludge or using asterisks and slashes as 𝑑𝑒 𝑓𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑜 mark-up.
“𝑆𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠 is important” vs. “Stress 𝑖𝑠 important”.
I look forward to the continuing evolution of plain text and would
welcome the ability to use italics in plain text without kludges. <i>But
I’m not holding my breath.</i>
Anybody making a formal proposal for italics encoding can be assured
that the proposal would be received with something less than
enthusiasm. But stranger things have happened.
Many of us here are old enough to remember when something like <PICTURE
OF A COW> was a non-starter because in-line pictures were out of scope
for a computer plain text standard. But now I could plop a picture of a
cow (or worse) right into this plain text e-mail, if I were so
inclined. That’s progress for you.
It’s too bad they called it 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐶ℎ𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑔𝑜 𝑀𝑎𝑛𝑢𝑎𝑙 𝑜𝑓
𝑆𝑡𝑦𝑙𝑒 instead of “The Chicago Manual of Correct American English
Orthographic Conventions for Text Publishing”, eh? Maybe “Style”
sounded more classy. But it *does* tend to make it simpler for people
to dismiss such distinctions as being merely stylistic.
But if the distinction is merely stylistic, we wouldn’t have needed to
develop typewriter or computer plain text kludges for them in order to
express ourselves properly.
(Apologies for length and Happy New Year!)
