From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Tue Jan 23 2007 - 15:34:57 CST
On 1/23/2007 4:06 AM, Jon Hanna wrote:
> Asmus Freytag wrote:
>>> If it's idiosyncratic the private use area should be put to use.
>> His use of this may have been idiosyncratic originally, but the use
>> of it in studies of his work is not.
>
> A study of an idiosyncratic mark doesn't stop it being idiosyncratic,
> and adoption of the mark does though.
>
In the case of the double hyphen I'm coming around to the view that its
used is specialized, not ideosyncratic. There is more than one
convention for using the mark in this case, and I strongly suspect that
they are others, as yet not reported here. I think our coding of the
Katakana double hyphen was in some sense a mistake, as the question
whether this is a character specific to the Katakana script probably
wouldn't hold up in the context of additional research. (However, with
as widespread a duplication of "wide" punctuation as we have in Unicode,
it can be construed as being effectively the wide character clone of a
generic double hyphen).
> Two differening examples from the same author would be Tengwar, which
> has been used by people outside of merely talking about Tolkien's use
> of it, and Tolkien's monogram, which hasn't.
>
I wouldn't make that distinction as absolutely as you are doing here. If
there is a group of people needing to communicate texts that contain a
character, it does not matter whether those texts are quotes or original
writing. What matters is their requirements in creating and transmitting
texts.
A more proper analogy here would seem to be the historic scripts, the
use of which is limited to scholars preparing editions of ancient texts
and their analysis.
>> Add to that the suspicion, if you will, that if double hyphens show
>> up in Schmidt, in Katakana contexts and possibly elsewhere, that
>> there is something generic to the concept of doubling a hyphen to
>> make a notational point.
>
> Katakana isn't a good argument here, Schmidt wasn't writing Japanese.
> If it's in Katakana it is surely a different character entirely.
I disagree, as explained above. The double hyphen is not a traditional
Japanese character, but a notation that's used by scholars, it's the
(generic) idea of a double hyphen applied to annotate a particular
feature. That does not make this character a Katakana character any more
than it would make a question mark applied to a Katakana sentence a
Katakana character. This was a clear case of a mis-analysis because we
had a proposal that came in a particular context and we didn't have the
full problem worked out.
>
> If there is something generic to the doubling of a hyphen to make a
> notational point then that generic quality will be demonstrable by
> examples.
>
> > Pushing people into
>> substituting = because it's the only thing that looks close is just
>> wrong.
>
> Yes. But if it is idiosyncratic then having scholars use a character
> from the PUA for Schmidt's idiosyncratic character is right.
Using the PUA could be the right thing if your interest was to merely
represent the appearance of a particular printed edition of a book as
faithfully as possible, and in a *private* context, such as under the
control of a single publisher.
The minute you have vigorous scholarship quoting text passages at each
other, any mark needed for that purpose is a lot less "private",
irrespective of whether it was once used in one person's idiosyncratic
(or as the wikipedia writes "willful" orthography).
But my larger point is that I see Schmidt's use of this character as an
idiosyncratic *use* of it, not as the invention of an idiosyncratic mark
as such. In that view, the punctuation mark "double hyphen" exists
independent of his usage, and over the years we keep seeing additional
evidence for it.
A convention to use double hyphen to distinguish between actual hyphens
in a hyphenated word that happen to be at the line break from
discretionary hyphens is something I seem to recall having seen in
actual use, btw.
A./
>
>
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Jan 23 2007 - 15:36:35 CST