Re: Combining latin small letters with diacritics

In other words, that circumflex is an epigraphic notation. This means
three distinct levels of analysis of the text: one for Chi, one for
the small letter above it noting something about the Chi, and another
for the circumflex noting something about the Chi itself.

This causes a major problem : how to separate cleanly those levels of
representation when diacritics are NOT supposed to modify a letter
orthographically ?

1) use an upper layer protocol (this is the position constantly
adopted, but it has its limits).

2) use a special invisible combining character used as prefixes (with
combining class 0 to avoid reorderings and other ambiguous combined
forms caused ny normalizations) to separate and provide an unspecified
additional semantic to the standard diacritics encoded after them.

3) Or possibly several of such special invisible combining characters
in a coherent set (we could have 16 of them, encoded at once in one
column in the special plane, each one with a numeric property which
does not designate how it will be used in actual texts, in a way
similar to the multiple variant selectors or multiple PUAs that are
not very well fitted for combining characters), it if is needed to
make semantic distinctions between these multiple (but optional)
epigraphic levels.

Le 11 mars 2012 14:06, Michael Everson <everson_at_evertype.com> a écrit :
> On 11 Mar 2012, at 12:05, Denis Jacquerye wrote:
>
>> Stacked letters are also found in some Greek manuscripts.
>> See the page http://www.archive.org/stream/revuearchologi27pariuoft#page/156/mode/1up
>> with some examples: Nu, omicron, omicron and Greek circumflex (tilde),
>> chi and Greek circumflex.
>> Would these also have to be represented by combining characters?
>
> Yes, but in this case I don't think that circumflex is part of the superscript letter per se. It's a base letter with a combining letter, and the whole thing has a mark over it to show it's an abbreviation. (There is obviously no chi-circumflex in Greek orthography.)
>
> Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
>
>
>
Received on Sun Mar 11 2012 - 18:40:36 CDT