Re: polytonic Greek: diacritics above long vowels ᾱ, ῑ, ῡ

> Most of the polytonic precomposed vowels are in the auxiliary exemplars for Modern Greek.
I don't know – probably because of the Katharevousa legacy and the fact
that Ancient Greek lives on in literary idioms, for which you ordinarily
don't use a macron for reasons of orthographic convention. (And as for
the breve, you shouldn't be needing it anyways.) It doesn't really
matter what the precise reason is: the two are different languages, so
"it's not in D, so it shouldn't be in A" is a /non sequitur/, esp if you
know that D is a typographically smaller language in a number of
respects. Or maybe someone made mistakes.

> One doesn't use the vowels with breve and macron for writing Ancient Greek in plain text; one uses them for writing about it.
I can see good rationale for having macron-based characters with
diacritics in a /font meant to be able to represent Ancient Greek/,
though I sense there was earlier confusion ;-) in this thread about
different uses of breves and macrons, ultimately rooted in

  * an outdated terminology talking of syllable "length" for weight
  * some lexicographic imprecision
  * at least two use cases: vowel length and scansion

(and this is of course orthogonal to the precomposition question), but
breve and macron belong tmk not into Demotic, so if your reasoning were
"everything in D needs to be in A" because D is a typographic subset of
A (and I don't think it is) that wouldn't work either.

Were you referring
>>> auxiliary exemplar characters for Modern Greek
to this?
http://www.unicode.org/repos/cldr-tmp/trunk/dropbox/mark/exemplars/summary.html
If so, you just
> A CLDR entry could get rather silly when deciding on the Attic, Ionic and Doric Greek for Yoruba and !Xu - Cambodia's going to be bad enough. Do we look for the Ancient Greek representation of Kambuja?
successfully lost me here :-)

> It depends on what criteria get applied for the CLDR entry.
Note that I wasn't really arguing for specific inclusion or exclusion,
just saying that it's unclear why D is used for an argument about A.

Stephan
Received on Sun Aug 04 2013 - 21:25:08 CDT