At 8:22 13.8.96, unicode@Unicode.ORG wrote:
>
>I was under the impression that in regular handwriting or print hyphen and
>minus
>look quite different. Only because of the severe limitations of 6 or 7 bit
>computer codes were they "merged" into a novelty that looks like neither. The
>same was done to the two English single quotes and the apostrophe.
>
>With a 16 bit code the limitations and the necessity are gone.
>
>Jonathan
The coming of smart computers is removing such limitations on writing in many
languages, including mine. Only the severe limitations of print technologies
of fifty years ago forced us to abandon our dotted consonants in print, while
retaining them in writing. However, since people didn't have to change their
signatures, we have the situation today of having legal documents, such as
wills, done up on typewriters (or on dumb PCs), using "h" instead of dots,
then manually signed, to make them legal, in lovely dotted, _normal_
native Irish script.
mg
-- mgunn@ucd.ie
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:31 EDT