From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Wed Jun 25 2003 - 13:34:18 EDT
At 09:29 AM 6/25/2003, Rick McGowan wrote:
> > What I'm suggesting is that although "cui" <0F45, 0F74, 0F72> and "ciu"
> > <0F45, 0F72, 0F74> should be rendered identically, the logical ordering
> > of the codepoints representing the vowels may represent lexical differences
> > that would be lost during the process of normalisation.
>
>If there isn't a visual difference here, how could there be a lexical
>difference? Imagine the age before computers. All you have to go on is
>what's on the page. There isn't an inherent order in those elements; they
>could have been written by the scribe in any order. If they appear the
>same, you can't assign different meanings -- except by some extra-syllabic
>informational context... right?
On the page, you would know -- or hopefully know -- from context. But a
search engine or a sorting algorithm looking at the characters presumably
needs to know the difference without additional context, hence the
character ordering is important.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores,
are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine,
who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint
Augustine and Stonehenge -- that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.
- Umberto Eco
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