From: Jim Allan (jallan@smrtytrek.com)
Date: Thu Sep 04 2003 - 10:09:54 EDT
Phippe Verdy posted:
> For the case of medieval texts, the change of appearance of these
> symbols (with shorter legs), just needs to be considered as a font
> variant, which would be in sync with the change of appearance of
> glyphs for letters in the mediaval text.
>
> If someone reproduces the mediaval text with (say) a "Arial Unicode"
> font, that will display long legs for ceiling brackets, it won't be
> wrong
> given that the narrow sans-serif style was actually never used for
> letters in medieval text.
Medieval texts and transliterations of cuneiform text are almost always
printed using modern fonts in modern style.
The original appearance of the text is not an issue (especially with
cuneiform). The text is represented in a modern font.
Regular square brackets are used to enclose editorial commentary. The
upper-half square brackets are often used to enclose editorial surmised
replacement of text missing because of damage to the original. This may
be a single character or several lines of text (which one may be able to
fill in approximately from another manuscript or tablet containing
approximately the same text).
They are sometimes used again in translations of such texts.
Using similar characters for the upper-half square brackets would be as
tyopgraphically abnormal as using << and >> or “ and ” instead of « and
» for quotation marks in French.
Neither is *wrong* if the proper characters are not available or someone
who knows the typographical issues decides purposely to substitute other
characters.
As far as I can tell the ceiling brackets and the upper-half square
brackets were created separately for different disciplines. They also
have different meanings.
Characters of different origin, different meaning and different
appearance are not usually considered to be style variants that should
be selected by changing a font.
Jim Allan
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