On 26/11/2003 04:40, Andrew C. West wrote:
On Tue, 25 Nov 2003 16:16:15 -0800, "Doug Ewell" wrote:
Well, one reason could be that there is no such character. (Did you
mean U+1034A GOTHIC LETTER NINE HUNDRED?)
But why do U+10341 [GOTHIC LETTER NINETY] and U+1034A [GOTHIC LETTER NINE
HUNDRED], which are letters that are only ever used to represent the numbers 90
and 900 respectively (they have no intrinsic phonetic value), not have a numeric
value assigned to them ? Is this perhaps because all the other Gothic letters
can also be used to represent numbers in exactly the same way that U+10341 and
U+1034A are used (these two letter were devised specifically to fill the gap in
the series of numbers represented by the ordinary Gothic letters), ...
Probably not. It doesn't take long to see that NINETY appears where one
might expect a Q and corresponds to the Greek koppa. Koppa was used as a
letter in very early Greek, but since then (and even to the present day)
as a numeral with the same value 90. See
http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/numerals.html#koppa. It is
clear from the value and the glyph that the Gothic NINETY is derived
from the Greek koppa. Similarly, the Gothic NINE HUNDRED is derived from
the Greek sampi (U+03E1).
--
Peter Kirk
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work)
http://www.qaya.org/
