Re: Ancient Greek apostrophe marking elision

For Volapük, it looks much more like U+02BE (right half ring modifier
letter)
than like U+02BC (apostrophe "modifier" letter).
according to the PDF on
https://archive.org/details/cu31924027111453/page/n12

The half ring makes a clear distinction with the regular apostrophe (for
elisions) or quotation marks. It is used really in this context as a
modifier after another consonnants for borrowing words *phonetically* from
other languages, notably after 'c' and 'l'. Then U+02BD (left half ring
"modifier" letter) is a regular letter (for translitterating the expirated
'h' from English). But I'm currious about the diacritic used above 'h' on
item (5) ("ta") of that page to transliteratiung the English soft "th". But
this was describing the "Labas" orthography.

On the next chapter ("Noms Tonabas"), another convention is used for the
aopostrophe like letters, and U+02BE (right half ring modifier letter) is
used instead of U+02BD for the expirated 'h' (see paragraph 18), but it is
said to use the "Greek mark" (not sure if the author meant the coronis
U+01FBD or the soft spirit U+01FBF).

So it looks like these were various early adaptations of the basic Volapük
orthography to borrow foreign names (notable proper names for people,
trademarks, toponyms and other place names), and these were part of several
competing proposals. I'm curious to know if there was finally a wide enough
consensus to standardize these.

So It seems that for Volapük all the apostrophe-like letters are not
formally assigned, authors will use anyone as they want when they
transliterate foreign words, or will simply avoid transliterating them
completely if they exist natively in a Latin form (I bet English is not
transliterated at all, and French or German accents are preserved as is if
they are already part of the basic alphabet and the only standard diacritic
is then the "diaeresis", as used in the German umlaut (Volapük does not
need any true diaeresis to avoid the formation of diphtongs and digrams,
all its orthography use a single base letter as a foundation principle.

If so, the 1st convention using the apostrophe-like modifier to create
digrams is probably not favored and ther Tonabas convention is proably more
convenient and more compliant t othe principles. I don't think they will
ever use directly the greek signs or letters (like the one used for
transliterating the English 'ng' and would prefer using now the Latin Eng
letter.

The right half-ring being rarely supported is now most probably supported
using U+02BC (for both letter cases, ignoring the bolder style for the
capital variant) which uses a curved comma shape (with a filled bowl at
top). If there are case distinction, the same glyph would be used but at
different height instead of using bold distinctions, or dictinction would
be made using the alternate forms of the comma (probably the wedge for
lowercase, and the bowl with curl for capitals).

Note: Are the different shapes of the comma (and similar apostrophe-like
letters, or even the semicolon) distinguished with encoded variant
selectors ?

Le dim. 27 janv. 2019 à 18:42, Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode <
unicode_at_unicode.org> a écrit :

> Well, sure; some languages work better with some fonts. There's nothing
> wrong with saying that 02BC might look the same as 2019... but it's
> nice, when writing Hawaiian (or Klingon for that matter) to use a bigger
> glyph. That's why they pay typesetters the big bucks (you wish): to make
> things look good on the page.
>
> I recall in early Volapük, ʼ was a letter (presumably 02BC), with value
> /h/. And the "capital" ʼ was the same, except bolder: see
> https://archive.org/details/cu31924027111453/page/n11 (entry 4, on the
> left-hand page).
>
> ~mark
>
> On 1/27/19 12:23 AM, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote:
> > On 1/26/2019 6:25 PM, Michael Everson via Unicode wrote:
> > the 02BC’s need to be bigger or the text can’t be read easily. In our
> > work we found that a vertical height of 140% bigger than the quotation
> > mark improved legibility hugely. Fine typography asks for some other
> > alterations to the glyph, but those are cosmetic.
> >> If the recommended glyph for 02BC were to be changed, it would in no
> case impact adversely on scientific linguistics texts. It would just make
> the mark a bit bigger. But for practical use in Polynesian languages where
> the character has to be found alongside the quotation marks, a glyph
> distinction must be made between this and punctuation.
> >
> > It somehow seems to me that an evolution of the glyph shape of 02BC in
> > a direction of increased distinction from U+2019 is something that
> > Unicode has indeed made possible by a separate encoding. However, that
> > evolution is a matter of ALL the language communities that use U+02BC
> > as part of their orthography, and definitely NOT something were
> > Unicode can be permitted to take a lead. Unicode does not *recommend*
> > glyphs for letters.
> >
> > However, as a publisher, you are of course free to experiment and to
> > see whether your style becomes popular.
> >
> > There is a concern though, that your choice may appeal only to some
> > languages that use this code point and not become universally accepted.
> >
> > A./
> >
> >
>
>
Received on Sun Jan 27 2019 - 15:31:31 CST