Peter Kirk <peterkirk at qaya dot org> wrote:
Anyway, the character "has well defined user community / usage", the
users of the dictionary in question. It is not clear that "user"
implies those who write the character, or only those who read it.
Many historical characters have been accepted for Unicode which are
not regularly written, except in copying old texts, but are still
regularly read.
This implies that the requirement for "interchange" of the proposed
character is no longer in effect, or at least seriously weakened. I'm
not sure if that's the case.
Well, if the publishers of this dictionary prepare an on-line edition and put it on the web, does that count as "interchange"? Or is "interchange" required to be bidirectional? This is a general principle which affects words used in ancient texts as well as cases like this one.
I don't know how many scholars actually *write* Linear B and Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform, creating a true "interchange" situation, but I'll bet it's more than the number of dictionary users who *write* th-with-strikethrough. ...
I would suspect that very few such scholars actually write new texts or even sentences. The most they are likely to do is to copy words or short phrases from existing texts, and reconstruct citation forms that are not actually attested. The characters I had in mind were in fact ones like the Greek zero sign and some other recently added Greek symbols, which occur in a very few MSS, see http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html. I am not objecting to these characters, far from it, just pointing out that some characters are used much less even than the ligatures in question.
Not CGJ please. That should not be used to affect the rendering of a character; and indeed attempts to use it in this way are likely to fail with much present software (see my 24 February posting to the Unicode Hebrew list). ZWJ might be suitable.... I don't see why this needs to be an atomic character instead of some combination of t, CGJ, h, and either U+0337 or U+0338.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
