From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Sun Dec 07 2003 - 14:34:39 EST
On 06/12/2003 20:28, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
> ...
>
>>
>> Take into consideration the innovation: a short glottal has been
>> added because people wanted to case it like other letters. They might
>> have made another typographic choice: they might have innovated a
>> wide capital to distinguish it from the "lowercase tall" letter. But
>> they didn't.
>
>
> Height is a (the?) recognized distinction between upper and lower
> case. Width isn't. So a "wide capital" wouldn't be the most
> intuitive choice.
But there is a precedent for this choice. When the Latin h was borrowed
into Cyrillic (U+04BB, borrowed c. 1940 for languages which were forced
to change from Latin to Cyrillic orthography at short notice), the lower
case glyph was borrowed unchanged complete with ascender. But the upper
case shape H was already in use for the sound n (U+041D), and so a new
upper case glyph had to be invented. The shape chosen, U+04BA, was
essentially a wide variant of h with upper case serifs (conveniently
also an inverted U+0427).
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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