From: Radovan Garabik (garabik@melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk)
Date: Thu Jun 12 2003 - 12:22:40 EDT
On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 02:20:42PM +0100, Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin wrote:
> On 2003.03.05, 07:58, Radovan Garabik <garabik@melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk>
> wrote:
>
> >> In the Slovak orthography, the lowercase d, l and t are normally written
> >> with the 'apostrophe' form of the accent.
> >
> > but only the printed version, not in handwriting
> <...>
> > In fact, the apostrophe form is used because there is a lack of
> > convenient space to put carons over "tall" letters d,t,l, whereas
> > there is no problem with n,e,r.
>
> In short, just like the allowed accentless capitals in French or the
> comma-cedilla in Roumanian, this is a case of technical contraints
Or like using apostrophe for capitals in Italian.
> limiting the ideal orthography, lead typesetting and mechanical
> typewrinting imposing limitations and suggesting kludges.
>
> Strange that now, when finnally there are technical and informational
> tools to achieve "perfection", this is viewed as a mistake and the old
> kludges, made traditional, are seen as correct and prefered to the
> idealized forms (nonetheless extant in handwriting).
>
> Quite a pity. IMHO, "we" should acknowledge that Unicode is not only a
> great tool for representing the (up to now) current typographic reality
> but also that it opens to the users a new space of typographical and
> othographical improvement, allowing emancipation from 200 of technical
> constraints.
Like, emancipation out of the need to use separate fixed-form letters,
and use handwritting-like ligatures and similar instead? :-)
(after all, Arabic script never gave up to mechanical typewriting kludges...)
Well, IMHO using apostrophe-like forms in Slovak/Czech is more of a
beauty than of a technological constrain - "tall" letters just look
too ugly when they are extended by yet another diacritics (slovak
ĺ U+013A LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH ACUTE is fortunately rather rare
letter :-)).
FWIW, I am now involved a bit in converting first grammar book in
"contemporary" (130 year old) variant of Slovak into electronic format,
and the book uses carons everywhere instead of apostrophe-like diacritics.
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