At 08:11 +0100 2003-09-03, Paul James Cowie wrote:
I wonder if anyone can help me track down two punctuation symbols in Unicode? - I've been through the charts and, try as I might, I can't seem to locate them....
They are used in the transliteration of cuneiform for partially preserved signs and look like the very top portions, respectively, of the parentheses marks : [ and ]
I'm hoping that they are supported in Unicode, as they are used frequently in Assyriological literature.
These half brackets are not yet encoded. The CEILING characters could be used by some (and are recommended by some for this purpose) but in my experience neither cuneiformists nor medievalists have accepted the CEILING characters. A proposal for medieval Nordic characters will contain these.
What's the problem with these CEILING characters? They are recommended not just "by some" but by the Unicode standard for "general-purpose corner brackets". Do cuneiformists and medievalists really need significantly different glyph shapes or properties? Do they just not like the glyphs in existing fonts? Or is this a case of the "not invented here" syndrome? We really can't start adding to Unicode separate sets of visually identical punctuation characters for each academic discipline. Are we next going to get proposals for separate full stops and commas for Egyptology, for cuneiform transliteration, and for medieval Nordic? Where does this stop?
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
