From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Mon Apr 07 2003 - 17:59:00 EDT
> Since Koppa has the same modern meaning as the ancient character (letter
> Koppa and 90), this runs contrary to my understanding of the Unicode
> philosophy, as I understand it.
The point Joop was making is that in *modern* Greek usage a
distinction is made, where the "lightning koppa" appears as a numeral
for numbering of legal clauses, or the like, but where the "lollipop
koppa" is the modern rendition of the archaic koppa (which, of course,
also had a numeric value). It is *this* distinction which led to
the separate encoding, not a failure to recognize that ultimately
all the koppas were, in some sense, the "same letter".
> Is there an established Unicode Greek
> sorting algorithm?
See the table for the Unicode Collation Algorithm, UTS #10.
It isn't an "established Unicode Greek sorting algorithm" per se,
but it does provide a default ordering for all Greek characters,
along with all other Unicode characters. Archaic koppa isn't
dealt with yet in that table, since it is a recent addition
to Unicode.
>
> I can see no reason to have lunate Sigma U+03F9 as a separate codepoint in a
> font. Unless convincing information is received, I think I'll include a
> lunate Sigma only as an alternate glyph to the "true" capital Greek Sigma,
> U+03A3. This should preclude sorting and search problems.
Probably a good idea.
Note that the lunate sigma was encoded also for *modern* reasons.
It is distinguished in modern typography, as Joop indicates.
And while it can create problems for sorting and searching,
there already is such a problem in modern Greek (or modern
Greek representations of Classical or Ancient Greek) because
of the sigma and final sigma -- both of which are also just
the "same letter". This is *already* handled in the Unicode
Collation Algorithm by giving all three flavors of sigma the
same primary weights:
03C3 ; [.0CA6.0020.0002.03C3] # GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA
03F2 ; [.0CA6.0020.0004.03F2] # GREEK LUNATE SIGMA SYMBOL; QQK
03C2 ; [.0CA6.0020.0019.03C2] # GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA; QQK
^^^^ ^^^^
primary tertiary
The differences in the weights are at the tertiary level, which
results in same sorting together with same, and these letters
only being distinguished the way that capital versus small
letters are distinguished.
Your problem, as a Classical numismatics specialist, (and the
same applies in general to paleographers and papyriologists)
is that you confront many *more* glyphs for the various
characters than just the very few distinctions that got
encoded as distinct forms in the Unicode Standard for one
modern reason or another. The eventual result is not going
to be the encoding of each distinct glyph of each distinct
letter as another character in Unicode. Instead, as you
are doing, you need to lay out a subsidiary variant space
which you can map to specialized fonts, and associate all
of those variants with the Greek alphabet (in your case) or
whatever base set of characters might apply in other
paleographic traditions.
--Ken
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Chris Hopkins
>
>
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