Chris Little wrote: > > Long s (ſ U+017F) still appears today as the left half of the letter ß, > which comes from a ligature of ſ and z (or ʒ).
That is actually not even very old. My dad still learnt the gothic hand writing regularly at school, while I learnt it from him out of interest as a teen. The ß is there exactly this - and its name in German is "SZ" (and only secodnarily a "sharp S") >> Taking the glyph shaping into account I would think the version we have >> is wrong as it tries to imitate this by using v and u - I have not seen >> enough, but I think overall a straight use of U only for both letters >> would be more correct - but equally difficult to read for some. > > I've never seen or heard of anyone encoding texts like these with an > assumption of glyph shaping by the renderer. Most people encode the text > as it appears. Some will modernize so that u means [u] and v means [v] > and [w] is rendered by w. Positional glyphshaping is simply not anymore part of modern script - but Gothic script, used in print and handwriting regularly until the 1930/40s, had still remnants of glyphshaping - mostly around the s. People get confused by it and also have difficulties separating form and content - and a lot (or most) encodings I found on the net appear to be done by enthusiasts and not by necessity by people with any semblance of scholarship. Nothing wrong with that. > I believe the 1611 KJV is usually encoded with u, v, w, i, & j encoded > as they appear on the page, but s & ſ are folded as s. I suppose we > could mirror the original orthography entirely and create a modernized > derivative. I don't know whether it would be possible to do the > modernization at run time via ICU transliteration. I think it would be equally valid to use u/v/w and i/j as pronounced (then and now) or u and i as printed. What I do not like though at all is an attempt to be archaic and mistakenly print sometimes a V and sometimes a U simply because concepts like glyphshaping are not recognised. If glyphshaping is desired - I am sure someone clever could design a nice ttf font doing just this on either basis - in Arabic and Farsi we use one code point for 4 shapes and there is little stopping anyone doin tthe same for older German or english texts. There are serious implications wrt search for trying to imitate the print-image and ignoring the content and the concept of glyphshaping - lots of German words are combined words and if a v sound ends up in the middle of a word and is rendered in a u shape as consequence we still want to find it in both instances - voll (full) and uebervoll (overfull) - encode one as voll and the next one as ueberuoll would loolk archaic but be unsearchable - much better to have this dealt with at a font level where a middle v becomes a U shape if necessary, but leave the encoding intact and searchable. Incidentally - and I have no answer on that - German glyph shaping form late 19th early 20th century worked on syllables - so voll and uebervoll would be the same, but these old texts seem to use word level - see eg Water Wasser. I learnt to write it as Wasſer - one shape being used at the end of a syllable, the other at the begin or middle. But the image I linked to wrote Waſſer - shaping at word level. I am not sure how consistent this was used. Peter Peter _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
