From: Jim Allan (jallanite@rogers.com)
Date: Mon May 19 2008 - 19:59:02 CDT
Philippe Verdy wrote:
> On the opposite there's the case of glottal stops, ayin, and similar
> sounds like consonnnantal clicks or centralized vowels: they need a
> letter, not a letter modifier, because they can frequently occur in
> leading position like other consonnants or vowels. And their letter form
> is also normally distinct from apostrophes: they should never be a
> vertical tick like a the ASCII quote, and they are slightly turned and
> effectively curved and also normally dissymetric in their form; these
> letters should also be visibly distinct from the elision apostrophe and
> the punctuation quotes... (they may be distinct from spacing accents but
> this is not strictly required in those languages as they don't need
> spacing accents).
You mean “Spacing Modifier Letter”, Philippe, not “letter modifier”.
Don’t repeat Chris’s minor error as though it had some meaning in
Unicode. As to whether a character can appear in leading position, that
signifies nothing. Read the Unicode manual:
“Modifier letters are an assorted collection of small signs that are
generally used to indicate modifications of a preceding letter. A few
may modify the following letter, and some may serve as independent letters.”
It is not for Unicode to tell scholars that they must not use shapes
that match curly apostrophes to indicate letters in Semitic languages,
especially when that has been the standard for over a century. Whether
they are called “letters” or “spacing modifier letters” really doesn’t
matter.
The translation glyphs for ʼaleph and ʻayan are usually either
absolutely identical to the English single quotation sorts in whatever
font is used or are the variant characters U+02BD MODIFIER LETTER RIGHT
HALF RING and U+02BE MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING. I have never seen
the characters you mention that differ from both these (other than the
very different characters in standard Egyptian Latin-letter
transcriptions). They certainly aren’t standard usage in the works I’ve
used.
Use of the straight apostrophe for ʼaleph was quite correct on English
typewriters and is often seen in books from the period of the fifties
and sixties when typewritten books were quite common for works requiring
what were called special characters. In such books ʻayan appears mostly
as a raised letter c created by manually turning the typewriter roller
down a bit and then typing c.
In computer texts of a later period, in works not using TeX or LaTeX, it
was common to indicate ʼaleph by ASCII 27, which might come out as
either a straight apostrophe or a curly apostrophe, and to indicate
ʻayan by ASCII 60 which came out as either a grave accent or a reversed
apostrophe corresponding to Unicode U+02BD MODIFIER LETTER REVERSE COMMA.
Of course, these were always intended as fall backs for the proper
typographical characters. But they were not incorrect in themselves
within the technology that produced them.
The real problem is the most fonts don’t support the Spacing Modifier
Letter apostrophe characters. For example the Macintosh Hawaiian
keyboard properly puts out the ʻokina character as U+02BB. But most
available fonts, so far as I know, don’t bother to support it. One must
use a limited set of fonts if typing Hawaiian or use the standard
English open quotation mark instead of the ʻokina.
Now one could build into the Unicode systems on operating systems a
table of substitute glyphs, whereby if one of the characters was missing
from a font, then the glyph attached to the substitute character would
be used. This would mean that any font that contained the curly
quotation marks would automatically use the same glyphs for the spacing
modifier letter apostrophe characters and so forth with other glyph
clones, for example two of the click characters.
Jim Allan
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