From: Alexej Kryukov (akrioukov@newmail.ru)
Date: Tue Aug 23 2005 - 10:30:51 CDT
On Tuesday 23 August 2005 02:20, John Hudson wrote:
>
> Out of interest, are the letter-titlos understood to be applied to
> base letters or to base words? Alexej's message refers to them being
> written 'above the word they belong to'.
I think this question may be investigated on the basis of various
European writings (not necessarily Cyrillic). Michael already correctly
pointed out that the characters I call letter-titlos ("bukvotitla" in
Russian and CS) are analogous to European medievalist combining letters.
As you know, placing a superscript letter above a contracted word was
a very common practice in medieval handwriting as well as in early
Greek printing. What is specific for CS is that in CS such contractions
are used on a regular basis and considered mandatory.
However I think the positioning rules are approximately the same
in all European scripts. Indeed, in handwriting superscript elements
of a contracted word are usually considered as applied to a base word
(or rather a morpheme). However, *in typography* they are normally
placed above a certain character, so that standard methods of
positioning combining marks would be enough for typesetting CS.
> Are they always single
> letters, or might a sequence of letter-titlos occur above a word?
Since letter-titlos are actually a sort of contraction markers,
and placing several contraction markers above a single word probably
makes no sense, normally should be no more than one letter-titlo
in a single word (at least unless this word is a composite one).
This is the case also of combining titlo U+0483, used either as a
contraction bar, or as a numeral sign (similar to Greek U+0374,
but written above the letters used in their numerical meaning).
-- Regards, Alexej Kryukov <akrioukov at newmail dot ru> Moscow State University Historical Faculty
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Aug 23 2005 - 10:31:33 CDT