From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Dec 18 2003 - 18:10:29 EST
> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : Philippe Verdy [mailto:verdy_p@wanadoo.fr]
> Envoyé : jeudi 18 décembre 2003 21:42
> À : Michael Everson
> Cc : Unicode@Unicode.Org
> Objet : RE: American English translation of character names
>
> Philippe Verdy
> > Isn't a caron a model (or trademark?) for crochet hooks?
> > When I look at some handwritten texts using hacek, it looks much
> > more like a rounded and oblique crochet hook than to a
> > reversed circumflex (as seen in Unicode charts).
> >
> > The handwritten hacek glyph looks approximately like this,
> > it is completely rounded without the angular shape:
> > (select a monospace font to view it)
> >
> > ##
> > ###
> > ###
> > ### ###
> > #### ###
> > ### ###
> > #### ####
> > ############
> > ######
> >
> > It is easily read distinctly from the breve and accute accents,
> > and it's not even a mirrored comma above.
> > The glyph is visibly drawn as a continuous stroke from the
> > middle-left to the thiner upper-right.
>
> I should have noted also that this handwritten glyph is coherent
> with its possible notation on the right side of letters with
> large ascenders, notably D, L, l and T.
>
> Which makes sense in that case, because this apostrophe is also
> more or less interpreted as a variant of the accute accent, and
> not a simply reversed circumflex.
>
> "Hácek" (pronounced hatchek, with the 'h' expirated,
> and with 'a' pronounced nearly like a short schwa) also means
> "little hook" in Czech...
>
> So the rounded "hook" glyph makes sense here, where the angular shape
> in Unicode charts is suspect and may have come from a historic bad
> interpretation of the Czech hatchek accent of by other latinists
> and typographers, who may have just borrowed the same metal shape
> used for circumflex to print Czech texts.
>
> If someone can find in a Czech library some old Handwritten scripts
> or even some source of Czech calligraphy, we could see if the
> angular modern form of hacek corresponds to its initial shape.
For now I can find this interesting page, which shows some dissymetric
shapes for the hacek diacritic in printed forms (however it is still
angular and reflects only modern use).
http://www.typo.cz/_cetba/cetba-clanky-souv.html
Other references for "hácky" or "hácek" are found on the same typo.cz
website:
http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp-q=h%E1%E8ek&sp-a=sp0112ee00&sp-p=any&sp-fXM
=Windows-1250
But I can't read Czech to know what it really speaks about.
Other typographic sources in Czech include also dissymetric hacek,
with the left side often bolder than the right side, also demonstrating
that it is normally drawn from left to right (i.e. faster on the right
side and often longer, in carefully drawn with handwritten glyphs):
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