> >>This list, the code points being entirely the choice of the present author, >>is published by the present author. > >I take this to mean: "I am publishing this list and the choices for >the code points are mine." >
Well, that is an almost correct interpretation of the meaning, almost, but not quite. As you are an eminent linguist, whose work I admire, particularly delighting in your clear love of precision, shown in various documents, such as the discussion about the necessity to include the yogh character in Unicode, and from whose documents about linguistics I have learned a great deal, perhaps you might allow me to explain why the sentence is written in the passive voice and my reasons for regarding your interpretation of the meaning of my sentence as not congruently correct. Please know that I would not go into such detail if, say, someone whose language was not English had asked me as to whether he or she had correctly understood the meaning of what I have written. Hopefully, as a linguist, you will be interested to know of my reasoning for writing the sentence in the form that I wrote it. You are welcome to respond if you consider that I have got it wrong. The thought might be to "take it to email" yet, perhaps there will be readers of this posting in the Unicode list who might be interested in your reply, as the use of English is a subject which often fascinates a wide audience. I have also added into this post, at the end, two other items about printing which will hopefully interest both you and other readers. The first thing that it is important to understand is that, feeling that the document is important to me and that it will hopefully be found of use in scholarly work by others, I decided to write the document in a formal style. The style used, that is, impersonal except where essential not to be impersonal and written in the passive voice, is the style that people studying science are taught to use when writing formal reports of experimental work. So, the style of this particular sentence is not at all unusual in the scenario of a formal report in science. Rather on the lines of the way that, after scientific meetings, a chairperson of a meeting might ask listeners to signify their "appreciation of the speaker in the usual manner" rather than saying "please applaud" or "let's give a round of applause". As the document concerns printing, the use of the word author on its own could be ambiguous, perhaps it means the author of the document about the code points or perhaps it means the author of the text, such as a poem, which is to be set. The use of the term 'the present author' thus unambiguously means the author of the document about the code points. As regards your interpreted sentence, the following matters arise. The verb does not convey the full meaning of the original sentence. "I am publishing" is a continuous tense: it could mean that I am in the process of organizing the publishing and that a hard copy publication of some sort is hopefully to appear soon rather than making a specific statement that the fact that the list which exists in the very document that you are reading is the publication itself. "This list .... is published" conveys exactly, precisely, the meaning that I intended. If I had to write a sentence in the form of your suggestion, I feel that I would need to write something of the form "I am here publishing", yet that also does not quite catch the meaning that "the list is published" conveying both the meaning of the one-off action of publishing and the continuing fact that the list has been published. The word 'for' would need to be replaced with the word 'of'. This is because I chose some code points from amongst the total set of code points which were available for me to use. Had I, in a different scenario, for some other item of research, chosen to define meanings for each of some code points in a given range, then the word 'for' would have been appropriate. I notice that you use the word choices whereas I used the word choice. This is interesting. In my sentence I made a choice (singular) of the code points. If I had, in a different scenario, chosen meanings for a given set of code points, then I would have made choices (plural) of those meanings. Yet in your sentence, if the word 'of' is substituted for the word 'for', should the sentence refer to one choice or a number of choices? Also, I feel that the sentence also needs "entirely mine" rather than just "mine" or perhaps "were entirely mine" or "was entirely mine". My original sentence catches the fact that I am accepting total responsibility for the choice of the particular code points, yet does not seek to make an intellectual property rights claim over the choice. I feel that your suggested sentence is ambiguous about this and could lead to confusion amongst people who might like to make use of the list in relation to their work. I feel that my original is much clearer in this regard. An interesting discussion. Thank you for your interest in reading my document. I wonder if perhaps you, or indeed anyone else reading this present document, might have any knowledge of what was the situation in olden days when long s characters were widely in use in relation to languages where there is today an accent on a letter s. Did accented long s characters exist, and did accented long s ligatures exist please, or were the accents disregarded or were the accents only introduced into the languages after the use of long s characters ceased for general printing purposes? An interesting factor in the development of the English alphabet may perhaps have been that when printing was introduced into England in 1476 by William Caxton, it was as an imported invention, William Caxton having learned of the invention while living on the European mainland and, I seem to remember from reading it somewhere, having gone to Cologne to learn how to print. Thus, maybe English lost some of its characters because the founts manufactured by fount makers in mainland Europe did not contain the required sorts. I wonder if any research has been done on looking at the characters in William Caxton's printing to work out from where he got his type by comparing the faces used with the faces used in books printed by printers on the European mainland and if anyone knows of any links to any items about that on the internet please. Today, when I see a pub with large letters spelling out the name starting with Ye I wonder whether we should claim our linguistic rights and have a giant thorn character instead of the Y. I can just imagine the situation being that the lettering for the pub would need to be imported from Iceland or something like that, all of the letters for the name because importing just one thorn character would not match the rest of the letters! Still, it's a thought for when the lettering is being replaced. Just for fun, can anyone think of a reasonable, historically correct, display sign that might be produced using a yogh character, which could perhaps be made and used as a display sign on a shop, such as a crafts shop, or on a restaurant? I find that such a fun exercise often leads to learning something interesting. William Overington 27 May 2002
