From: Ernest Cline (ernestcline@mindspring.com)
Date: Tue Feb 17 2004 - 23:15:28 EST
> [Original Message]
> From: Kenneth Whistler <kenw@sybase.com>
> To: <everson@evertype.com>
>
> > It is too late for that, Ken. Sorry. Indo-Europeanists have
> > requirements just as real as Uralicists did. And having some
> > subscripts available but not the rest isn't acceptable. Why would
> > it be?
>
> Because the concept of "the rest" is ill-defined.
Actually it is, "the rest" equals "the Professor and Mary Ann". :)
I think Unicode would have been better served had it just adopted
subscript and superscript modifiers, but it probably is too late to
go to that model.
Given the existing letters subscript i and subscript u, I can't see
any particular reason to be against subscript a, e, or o
based on the examples given here. Subscript x and / are
somewhat more problematic for different reasons.
The subscript x could be interpreted as a variable indicated by
markup rather than as a distinct letter. I'd really like to see an
example of its use where the character it is modifying is presented
in a plain font instead of an italic font, so as to be able to better
judge whether it is being used as variable (which should use markup)
or as a modifier letter (in which case character allocation is warranted.
Given the inability of the subscript / to stand alone, I'd also like to see
more documentation of it, especially documentation that shows
that its usage is fairly standard within the Indo-Europeanist community.
Based on the two given examples, I have to wonder if those particular
authors didn't just create the notation on the fly, given that one example
shows parenthesis around the pair and the other doesn't.
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