Re: polytonic Greek: diacritics above long vowels á¾±, á¿‘, á¿¡

On Wed, 7 Aug 2013 01:42:06 +0200
Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr> wrote:

> 2013/8/6 Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham_at_ntlworld.com>
>
> > For example, I think the proper
> > upper-casing of <U+1FB3 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH
> > YPOGEGRAMMENI, U+0359 COMBINING ASTERISK BELOW> is <U+0391 GREEK
> > CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA, U+0359, U+0196 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER IOTA,
> > U+0359>.
> >
>
> Why do you use U+0196 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER IOTA instead of U+399 GREEK
> CAPITAL IOTA ???

That's a mistake. Sorry.

> I'm also not convinced that duplicating the combining asterisk below
> is correct here. My opinion is that it should be:
> <U+0391 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA, DOUBLE COMBINING ASTERISK BELOW,
> U+0399 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER IOTA>
> with a new "double" diacritic encoded between both letters (it will be
> shown as a single asterisk, centered below the gap between the two
> capital letters...

The asterisk below indicates that someone once read the letter above,
but it can no longer be verified, e.g. because of further deterioration
of the manuscript. If one converts the text to capitals, the asterisk
below would indicate that the letters cannot be vouched for by the
publisher of the new text, and it makes sense for each unverified
letter to have its own asterisk.

> There's no such "double combining asterisk" character in the UCS. But
> if you replace the asterisk by a macron (below or above) there exists
> such double diaritic. The problem is that collation with strength
> ignoring case diferences will not compare these strings as equal.

> Or it could also be:
> <U+0391, WJ, U+359, U+0399>
> using a zero-width word joiner to hold the simple combining asterisk
> below (this will create three grapheme clusters, with the second one
> kerned below the two surrounding letters).

That's not what U+2060 WORD JOINER does. It tells the word breaking
algorithm that is being applied (presumably to scripta continua here)
that there is no word boundary between the two letters. I don't
believe that there is a character that does what you want.

> I think this solution is preferable because collation with strength
> ignoring case diferences (and treating WJ as ignorable) will compare
> the uppercased string as equal to the original lowercase string.

Alternatively, give U+0359 COMBINING ASTERISK BELOW only tertiary
weight. It doesn't seem right to give it priority over accent
differences.

Richard.
Received on Tue Aug 06 2013 - 19:30:44 CDT