Dear Unicode List Members,
Dear Mr. Everson
I don't know too much about the standards, about ISO and the Unicode
Consortium. I'm a student, so to take part in the Unicode Conference is
too expensive for me, as I live in Germany (although I'd love to be able
to do it).
Nevertheless, I think there is a serious problem, which has been
naglected so far.
As you know, there are 9 diactritical characters in the Polish language:
<A;> <C'> <E;> <L//> <N;> <O'> <S'> <Z'> <Z.>
To be literal -- there are "A" and "E" with a small thing under the
letter (called "ogonek", which is a Polish word itself), then there's an
"L" with a stroke in the middle of the letter, a "Z" with a dot above
(the dot is the same as in the small "i") and, finally, there are five
letters with an accent above.
The accent seems to be similar to the acute accent, so it has been
assumed, that it actually IS acute.
But, it isn't.
The Polish accent (let's call it "kreska") is placed differently, it
looks different. It's more upright and placed more to the right than
acute. And it's been so for several hundreds of years, since they've started
to write and print in the POlish language.
Poland is a young democracy. When the idea of an international standard
was born, we had to manage with another problems so that there was no
Polish standarizing gremium (and still there is no such one) which could
report this problem and find the solution in the last several years.
If nothing changes, i.e. if "LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH ACUTE" will still
be considered as a (among other things) POLISH character, Polish children
(it's gonna be dramatic ;) in 20 years will have no idea how the correct
letter "O z kreska" looks like.
I will appreciate your comments and ideas.
Thanks in advance,
Adam Twardoch
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