Re: Is U+0140 (l with middle dot) ever used?

From: Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin (antonio@tuvalkin.web.pt)
Date: Tue Aug 13 2002 - 19:23:47 EDT


I made a mistake:

> And, yes, L + middle dot + L is indeed used: in a smallish number of
> catalan words, even if the barcelonian [normative] pronunciation
> doesn't distinguish between "L" and "L·L", though it doubles a number
> of other consonants.

This should be the barcelonian [non-normative] pronunciation, i.e.,
trivial-level catalan as spoken in Barcelona streets, not formal-level
catalan as used by mostely Barcelona-based entities, like Regional
Government, Universities or radio and television.

As for the nature of the middle dot, short of a specific code point
attributed to LATIN LETTER CATALAN MIDDLE DOT, there should be something
ensuring that this character can be treaded as a letter for all things
refering to word delimitation (smart select, line break, word count,
etc.).

I imagine that with 9 million native speakers catalan may appear as a
weak lobby to push to such a change in the standard, but note that while
other uses of (non-letter) middle dot are marginal and scarcely content-
bearing, catalan middle dot is central and essencial to quality textual
content representation and encoding -- which AFAIK Unicode is all about.

(In the two paragraphs above I used "letter" in a typographical meaning,
not as a linguist would, of course.)

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