From: Marnen Laibow-Koser (marnen@marnen.org)
Date: Sat May 05 2007 - 10:25:26 CST
On May 5, 2007, at 11:55 AM, Michael Everson wrote:
> At 11:46 -0400 2007-05-05, Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:
>> I think there is a difference, but I am having trouble figuring
>> out where it lies if your case is the only grounds for inclusion
>> of capital ß.
>
> I never said that the grounds for encoding it was only preference
> in the spelling of personal names.
Fair enough. That was what you seemed to imply; I'm glad to know
that this isn't the case.
>
>> I rephrase the question: does Unicode, as it stands before this
>> proposal, really deny Peter the character he needs?
>
> Yes, it really does.
It denies Peter the character he *wants*. I am still not convinced
that it denies him the character he *needs* -- after all, unless the
spelling standards change, WEISS is the recommended uppercase of Weiß.
>
>>> What the Innenministerium puts on his Ausweis is perhaps beyond
>>> his control, but what he prefers to send and receive in e-mail is
>>> his business.
>>
>> Yes. But if he departs from standard spelling, perhaps he
>> shouldn't expect a standard encoding to contain the characters he
>> needs.
>
> Dotted consonants are no longer used in the standard spelling of
> Irish, but they are encoded nonetheless.
The words "no longer" are the crux of your point here, I think.
Dotted consonants are part of an older spelling standard, so they are
needed to properly encode older texts (unless they were encoded as
ligatures with H...but let's not go there :) ). So far as I can
tell, [ß] has never been part of *any* spelling standard, and has
been only an idiosyncrasy.
Now, I think I still favor encoding it -- after all, there's no
adequate way to represent it with what we have, and people certainly
*are* using it in non-trivial numbers. But I thought that the
arguments you advanced in this post were a little thin.
>
>>>> If I want Laibow-Koser to be uppercased as LAIBOW-K9SER, that
>>>> doesn't mean we suddenly need a LATIN UPPERCASE O TYPE TWO that
>>>> looks suspiciously like DIGIT NINE, does it?
>>>
>>> I'm not impressed by the analogy. Sorry.
>>
>> And why not? Where is the difference? What am I doing that Peter
>> is not, or vice versa?
>
> You invented LATIN UPPERCASE O TYPE TWO. But LATIN CAPITAL LETTER
> SHARP S is nothing new, and has been around for a century at least.
OK, that's reasonable. I suppose if it caught on, we *might* need o -
> 9...
Best,
-- Marnen Laibow-Koser marnen@marnen.org
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