Re: Back to Coptic (was: Demystifying the Politburo)

From: asadek@st-elias.com
Date: Fri Jul 08 2005 - 11:13:53 CDT

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: Back to Coptic (was: Demystifying the Politburo)"

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "Michael Everson" <everson@evertype.com>

    > You are inconsistent here. You thanked me for disunifying COPTIC
    > LETTER KHI from GREEK LETTER CHI, and for disunifying COPTIC LETTER
    > RO from GREEK LETTER RHO.

    But it does not matter, the KHI-RO symbol is universal and not part of the
    Greek block (it shares all the same attributes even its name and meaning
    in Latin, Greek, Coptic,etc.)

    Now people have a choice of two KHI-RO characters when writing in Latin and
    they want to refer to this symbol? I really see no reason for this added
    confusion: how many NUMERO signs should we add? One for Latin and one
    for Cyrillic (and maybe a few for CJK)? These NUMERO signs often have
    slightly different shapes (as do the CHI-RO and KHI-RO) in the different
    traditions that use them. This is matter of font, not characters.

    > Previously, people argued that they
    > shared the same meaning, the same appearance, the same name, the
    > same typographical behaviour and the same origin. It took many
    > years of struggle to get the committees to accept the
    > disunification. In point of fact, CHI RHO and COPTIC SYMBOL KHI RO
    > don't share the same appearance, which is one of the factors behing
    > the disunification in the first place.

    You mean: they often don't have the same appareance, as most glyph
    variants would. How many slightly different universal CHI RO glyph variants
    do you want me to find? How many glyphs variants of any symbols?

    >
    > > Analogies rarely completely work, but should we find as many NUMERO symbols
    > > U+2116 as there are scripts using this symbol (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, etc.)?
    >
    > That analogy doesn't work. The Coptic glyph for KHI RO is pretty
    > much unsuitable for most Latin and Greek contexts.

    You did say glyph. Most (universal) symbols adapt to the surrounding style (font,
    script and typographical traditions). For the life of me, I cannot imagine when
    someone would want to distinguish these KHI-RO and CHI-RO in plain text,
    there is no semantic or linguistic meaning added by the distinction, only a font
    one.

    One must not be carried away by the Greek/Coptic disunification of what was
    not even in the Greek block!

    But I understand that the harm is done and this mistake cannot be corrected,
    it is unfortunate: two similar KHI-RO signs to refer to exactly the same thing.

    As far as the Lord abbreviation is concerned, I tend to agree with Mr. John
    Hudson: the glyph shown in the chart is a rare glyph variant of the standard
    abbreviation which has a bar. There is no reason to force people to always
    add a bar (nothing is gained except extra labour and making searching,
    sorting for such a symbol more complicated as it could be represented
    without any semantic gain in two different fashions). Changing the reference
    glyph in the charts to add a bar would avoid this risk. No one will then be
    tempted to add an extraneous bar whatever your "model".

    I hope that at least on this topic we may reach a consensus and correct a glyph
    error in the charts otherwise I fear people will be encoding in various ways
    the exact same symbol (as you said yourself it may represent a string of forms).

    Ashraf Sadek



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