Re: Greek Diacritics Again

From: Antoine Leca (Antoine.Leca@renault.fr)
Date: Tue Nov 28 2000 - 05:56:40 EST


Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>
> Antoine answere Lukas Pietsch:
>
> > Now, about U+030D (combining vertical line above), which happens to have a
> > note appended saying tonos, I believe this is slightly misleading, but
> > any reader that has doubt here will be directed in the correct way by looking
> > at the note appended to U+0301:
> > = Greek oxia, tonos
> > (I am referring myself to NamesList-3.0.0.txt, available from www.unicode.org)
> > The book says very probably the same, but I did not check.
> > The same holds for U+0344.
>
> There is a note "Tonos" appended to the character name for U+030D in
> ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000, but *not* in the Unicode Standard.

Sorry Ken, but I cannot understand you here.
As I said, I was referring myself to NamesList-3.0.0.txt
<URL:http://www.unicode.org/Public/3.0-Update/NamesList-3.0.0.txt>,
because Dr. Freytag explained us a while ago that this is better source
about the meaning of a character than the database is.
As far as I know, this file has not been updated since Aug 25, 1999.
This file says:
  030D COMBINING VERTICAL LINE ABOVE (Tonos)
          * Marshallese
          x (modifier letter vertical line - 02C8)

I also checked the database. The most recent version I can see is 3.0.1
<URL:http://www.unicode.org/Public/3.0-Update1/UnicodeData-3.0.1.txt>.
Which says:
  030D;COMBINING VERTICAL LINE ABOVE;Mn;230;NSM;;;;;N;NON-SPACING VERTICAL
LINE ABOVE;Tonos;;;

I do not know the exact technical term that is to be used in this context,
but the /mention/ "Tonos" added after the English name of the character
definitively looks like a /note/ to me.

I know Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 have to be aligned, so I understand
perfectly this can be the very reason why this /mention/ is ever present.
I also understand such a note could not be removed, how irrelevant it is,
because of the backward compatibility problems. No problem with me here.
My only point is that, when someone seeks after "tonos" in NamesList,
there are two good things that are present, and another which is not:
- good thing, as I said, under U+0301, it is said this is the Greek tonos;
- good thing, under U+0344, it is said this character is deprecated, and
  it is canonically decomposed as U+0308 U+0301;
- another missing point is that, under U+030D, no mention exists to explain
  that despite the name and /mention/, this is *not* the Greek tonos

Antoine



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