On 8/14/2019 7:49 PM, James Kass via
Unicode wrote:
On 2019-08-15 12:25 AM, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote:
Empirically, it has been observed that
some distinctions that are claimed by
users, standards developers or implementers were de-facto not
honored by type
developers (and users selecting fonts) as long as the native
text doesn't
contain minimal pairs.
Quickly checked a couple of older on-line PDFs and both used the
comma below unabashedly.
Quoting from this page (which appears to be more modern than the
PDFs),
http://www.trussel2.com/MOD/peloktxt.htm
"Ij keememej ḷọk wōt ke ikar uwe ippān Jema kab ruo ṃōṃaan ilo
juon booj jidikdik eo roñoul ruo ne aitokan im jiljino ne
depakpakin. Ilo iien in eor jiljilimjuon ak rualitōk aō iiō—Ij jab
kanooj ememej. Wa in ṃōṃkaj kar ..."
It seems that users are happy to employ a dot below in lieu of
either a comma or cedilla. This newer web page is from a book
published in 1978. There's a scan of the original book cover.
Although the book title is all caps hand printing it appears that
commas were used. The Marshallese orthography which uses
commas/cedillas is fairly recent, replacing an older scheme
devised by missionaries. Perhaps the actual users have already
resolved this dilemma by simply using dots below.
That may be the case for Marshallese. But
wouldn't surprise me.
My comments were based on a different case
of the same kinds of diacritics below (other languages) and at
the time we consulted typographic samples including newsprint
that were using pre-Unicode technologies. In that sense a
cleaner case, because there was no influence by what Unicode did
or didn't do.
Now, having said that, I do get it that some
materials, like text books, online class materials etc. need to
be prepared / printed using the normative style for the given
orthography.
But it's a far cry from claiming that all
text in a given language is invariably done only one way.
A./
