Re: Combining latin small letters with diacritics

From: Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2012 00:44:28 +0100

Also I do think that this proposal would avoid havng to encode many
new "precomposed" diacritics made of a diacritic letter and a
diacritic applying to it. We would just encode them using such
separator first, before the encoded diacritic letter, and the standard
combining diacritics.

With this tool, immediately, we can cover all scripts at once, for all
languages and all usages.

Le 12 mars 2012 00:36, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr> a écrit :
> In other words, that circumflex is an epigraphic notation. This means
> three distinct levels of analysis of the text: one for Chi, one for
> the small letter above it noting something about the Chi, and another
> for the circumflex noting something about the Chi itself.
>
> This causes a major problem : how to separate cleanly those levels of
> representation when diacritics are NOT supposed to modify a letter
> orthographically ?
>
> 1) use an upper layer protocol (this is the position constantly
> adopted, but it has its limits).
>
> 2) use a special invisible combining character used as prefixes (with
> combining class 0 to avoid reorderings and other ambiguous combined
> forms caused ny normalizations) to separate and provide an unspecified
> additional semantic to the standard diacritics encoded after them.
>
> 3) Or possibly several of such special invisible combining characters
> in a coherent set (we could have 16 of them, encoded at once in one
> column in the special plane, each one with a numeric property which
> does not designate how it will be used in actual texts, in a way
> similar to the multiple variant selectors or multiple PUAs that are
> not very well fitted for combining characters), it if is needed to
> make semantic distinctions between these multiple (but optional)
> epigraphic levels.
>
>
> Le 11 mars 2012 14:06, Michael Everson <everson_at_evertype.com> a écrit :
>> On 11 Mar 2012, at 12:05, Denis Jacquerye wrote:
>>
>>> Stacked letters are also found in some Greek manuscripts.
>>> See the page http://www.archive.org/stream/revuearchologi27pariuoft#page/156/mode/1up
>>> with some examples: Nu, omicron, omicron and Greek circumflex (tilde),
>>> chi and Greek circumflex.
>>> Would these also have to be represented by combining characters?
>>
>> Yes, but in this case I don't think that circumflex is part of the superscript letter per se. It's a base letter with a combining letter, and the whole thing has a mark over it to show it's an abbreviation. (There is obviously no chi-circumflex in Greek orthography.)
>>
>> Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
>>
>>
>>
Received on Sun Mar 11 2012 - 18:46:00 CDT

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