KW>The difference from the "7" is that that was always known to
just be
a workaround for keyboards that had no glottal stop. The same
problem arises for orthographies that used "?" for a glottal
stop. Neither should be perpetuated into the future because of
the problems such overloading will cause.
I agree that these were hacks, that the overloading creates
problems, and that it would be better to eliminate such use. I
don't know what it would take to make changes in the linguistic
communities where 7 has been adopted, however. This constitutes
an orthography change and so, in principle, falls into the same
category as suggestions for reforming English orthography,
albeit there is a very big difference in that this case
consistitutes only a change in glyph shape and in encoding. I
would certainly recommend that linguistic communities that have
used 7 in the past adopt something else as technology for doing
this comes within their reach. Such decisions still rest in
their hands, however. If a community insists on sticking with
the 7 glyph, then hopefully they can still be convinced to
encode it in Unicode as U+0294 and use a glyph variant.
Peter
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:51 EDT