From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun Mar 28 2004 - 16:25:04 EST
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin" <antonio@tuvalkin.web.pt>
To: <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Sunday, March 28, 2004 7:02 PM
Subject: Re: U+0140
> On 2004.03.27, 11:12, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>
> >>> This becomes evident when composing with extra-space between
> >>> letters: there is no "tie" between the first "L" and the dot.
> >
> > Interesting comment, because I had always thought that this
> > middle-dot was a modifier of the previous L,
>
> That was apparently the whole idea behind the first implementation of
> this chararcter. (Where does it come from? MacWestern? No ISO:8859
> covers it, AFAIK.)
>
> > and I didn't think about syllabic hyphenation.
>
> Your're not supposed to. But people creating encoding should have done
> more than just grab glyphs from assorted text. (Too bad that the few
> people who can do it seriously are not rewarded for it...)
>
> >>> Using this character for Catalan texts additionally causes
> >>> hyphenation problems.
> >
> > So what would be the "hyphenation problems"?
>
> Something happends when the "L·L" coincides with a soft line end. I'm
> no expert in Catalan typesetting but IIRC the dot becomes a hyphen,
> while regular "LL"s cannot be broken.
>
> I could ask about this in Catalonia, as also many of us, bvut it falls
> outside the scope of Unicode.
>
> > Also what is the normal placement of the middle-dot after a
> > uppercase L letter, doesn't it kern into the space above the
> > horizontal bar?
>
> Kerning is kerning, right. What is the normal placement of a "V" after
> an "A", or a "º" after a "."?... Thsey are separate characters, and
> kerning is not a matter for Unicode.
>
> > If I understand what you say here, that it's not a diacritic that
> > modifies that first L,
>
> Yes, it is not.
>
> > so that this middle-dot is effectively a orthographic hyphen similar
> > in essence to other orthographic hyphens that are used to create
> > compound words, or to mark the inversion of the verb and pronominal
> > subject
>
> More or less, yes. But while this kind of hyphens and apostrophes
> separate two "words", the Catalan middle do between two "L"s does not.
>
> > But in that case, is that middle-dot to be considered as a regular
> > punctuation mark in Catalan?
>
> More like a letter, from a typography point of view.
Not really, if it can be freely changed into a regular hyphen at line breaks;
now your comments interestingly makes me think about a explicit and visible
syllable break.
Not not too far from the hyphen used between two parts of
a compound word (which interestingly tends to disappear in modern
orthographs of lots of compound words, such as "presse-papier" in French
where the hyphen is needed between what is originately a verb and a nound
to build a single noun, and that some write now as a single word
"pressepapier" as it simplifies the rule for plural marks, or for neologisms
like "kilo-octet" more often written now "kilooctet" even though it causes
problems for the separate pronunciation of the double vowel "oo").
I suppose that in Catalan, one could use the middle dot to mark this
syllable break in words like "kilo.octet".
But the question of word-breaks is highly context-sensitive and language-
dependant. It's hard to tell from a hyphen such as the one in the previous
line, if it's a word-break hyphen or a compound-word composing hyphen.
- Just look at this paragraph and you'll see several hyphens whose meaning
differs even in English here. ;-)
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