From: Luke-Jr (luke@dashjr.org)
Date: Wed Mar 09 2011 - 14:07:05 CST
On Wednesday, March 09, 2011 2:17:21 pm Julian Bradfield wrote:
> On 2011-03-09, Peter Constable <petercon@microsoft.com> wrote:
> > From: David Starner [mailto:prosfilaes@gmail.com]
> >
> >> I don't understand your message.
> >> http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015017382519;page=root;view=
> >> image;size=100;seq=15;num=7 shows a page from a book on the duodecimal
> >> system that
> >> uses two completely new characters for 10 and 11, that can
> >> not be unified with any other characters in Unicode.
> >
> > If there are characters in established usage that are truly new and
> > that cannot be unified with existing characters, then they can be
> > considered for encoding. It's not clear to me that the characters on
> > that page for ten and eleven satisfy those criteria. In particular,
> > the character for ten appears to be nothing more than LATIN CAPITAL
> > LETTER T. I can't tell what the letterform for eleven is--whether
> > it's some kind of script l or a script-form ligature of e and l.
>
> Not at all. The numeral for ten is clearly NOT a LATIN CAPITAL LETTER
> T - rather, it's a symbol that has been designed to be reminiscent of
> but distinct from a T (compare it with the Ts on the same page);
> similarly the eleven symbol is a special sort that is like L but not
> the same. This is explained on page 15: (duodecimal), which since the
> OCR doesn't understand non-decimal page numbers is reached by going to
> (decimal) page 15 in the jump to page box.
> Of course, as it says, T and L can be used if you don't have the
> special sorts.
More relevant, in my experience: how many people actually use this number
system? The tonal number system (base 8*2) has entirely new digits for the
high range, yet Unicode won't even consider encoding it without a large
community of actual usage.
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