From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Fri May 23 2008 - 19:13:30 CDT
> The full stop is used as a letter in Tlingit (spoken in Akaska and
> British Columbia), denoting the glottal stop (see e.g.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlingit_language ...).
> Why there is no MODIFIER LETTER FULL STOP in analogy to the
> MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA?
For the same reason that there is no MODIFIER LETTER ASCII APOSTROPHE
to represent the use of U+0027 APOSTROPHE in those same
orthographies.
If you look at the details of the Tlingit popular orthographies,
which were deliberately with 8859-1 in mind and adjusted for email,
they made explicit use of 0x27 and 0x2D. (i.e. U+0027 and U+002D
in Unicode)
Neither of those characters is going to behave very well for word selection,
for example, in off-the-shelf software, but so be it. That's
what happens when you repurpose common punctuation marks as
letters in a popular orthography for a small language that
won't have widespread localization of software available for it.
> Has a proposal to encode a MODIFIER LETTER FULL STOP (MODIFIER
> LETTER BASELINE DOT seems to be a more appropriate name) based
> on such evidence (i.e. some more examples and a more thrustworthy
> source for its use than Wikipedia) any chance to be successful?
IMO, no. Not only would it simply introduce confusion into
the representation of Tlingit and be little supported (less
than 02BC and 02BB, which already are problem enough for
display), but it would create another irrelevant uproar in
the IETF, because of the central importance of "dot" as a
delimiter for URIs and related constructs.
--Ken
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