From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Thu Jan 03 2008 - 15:04:28 CST
Michael wrote:
> The thing is clearly a capital letter, being based on a capital G.
It is no such thing. It is based on a fusion of the capital G
and the lowercase j, as everybody else has pointed out already.
> I
> don't believe it is caseless, or lower-case, despite its use in
> phonetic text.
And I concur with Peter, Asmus and others, disagreeing with you.
> The small script g is in my view its natural
> lower-case pair;
That is more than just wrong -- it would create implementation
issues because the small script g has a compatibility
decomposition, undergoes changes in NFKC and NFKD normalization
forms, and is part of the paradigmatic set of math
alphanumeric symbols, which already *HAS* an uppercase
script G, U+1D4A2 MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL G, -- which
is clearly *NOT* the French-in-German-GEEGAW we are talking
about.
> Andreas' small-caps G-with-j-and-dot-above is a far
> worse and unnecessary invention.
Well, I do agree that we don't need to go there, either.
The simplest and safest way to handle this is to treat it
as another one-off symbol that saw some minor usage in
a limited set of German dictionaries, and to treat it
in Unicode as a letterlike symbol, comparable to several
other "ligated" letter-letter combinations that got
into the standard for non-orthographic, special uses:
2104;CENTRE LINE SYMBOL;So;0;ON;;;;;N;C L SYMBOL;;;;
2114;L B BAR SYMBOL;So;0;ON;;;;;N;;;;;
and so on.
This should be encoded simply as:
XXXX;G J SYMBOL;So;0;ON;;;;;N;;;;;
and be done with it.
Note that the dictionary in question itself treats this
as other than a Latin letter:
"Französische Laute ... werden durch lateinische Buchstaben
oder besondere Zeichen erläutert (...)."
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And in the context, it is quite clear that the "besondere
Zeichen" in question consist of the GEEGAW symbol and the
subscripted tildes to represent nasalization of vowels.
--Ken
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