----- Original Message ----- From: "Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, March 28, 2004 7:02 PM Subject: Re: U+0140
> On 2004.03.27, 11:12, Philippe Verdy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >>> This becomes evident when composing with extra-space between > >>> letters: there is no "tie" between the first "L" and the dot. > > > > Interesting comment, because I had always thought that this > > middle-dot was a modifier of the previous L, > > That was apparently the whole idea behind the first implementation of > this chararcter. (Where does it come from? MacWestern? No ISO:8859 > covers it, AFAIK.) > > > and I didn't think about syllabic hyphenation. > > Your're not supposed to. But people creating encoding should have done > more than just grab glyphs from assorted text. (Too bad that the few > people who can do it seriously are not rewarded for it...) > > >>> Using this character for Catalan texts additionally causes > >>> hyphenation problems. > > > > So what would be the "hyphenation problems"? > > Something happends when the "L�L" coincides with a soft line end. I'm > no expert in Catalan typesetting but IIRC the dot becomes a hyphen, > while regular "LL"s cannot be broken. > > I could ask about this in Catalonia, as also many of us, bvut it falls > outside the scope of Unicode. > > > Also what is the normal placement of the middle-dot after a > > uppercase L letter, doesn't it kern into the space above the > > horizontal bar? > > Kerning is kerning, right. What is the normal placement of a "V" after > an "A", or a "�" after a "."?... Thsey are separate characters, and > kerning is not a matter for Unicode. > > > If I understand what you say here, that it's not a diacritic that > > modifies that first L, > > Yes, it is not. > > > so that this middle-dot is effectively a orthographic hyphen similar > > in essence to other orthographic hyphens that are used to create > > compound words, or to mark the inversion of the verb and pronominal > > subject > > More or less, yes. But while this kind of hyphens and apostrophes > separate two "words", the Catalan middle do between two "L"s does not. > > > But in that case, is that middle-dot to be considered as a regular > > punctuation mark in Catalan? > > More like a letter, from a typography point of view. Not really, if it can be freely changed into a regular hyphen at line breaks; now your comments interestingly makes me think about a explicit and visible syllable break. Not not too far from the hyphen used between two parts of a compound word (which interestingly tends to disappear in modern orthographs of lots of compound words, such as "presse-papier" in French where the hyphen is needed between what is originately a verb and a nound to build a single noun, and that some write now as a single word "pressepapier" as it simplifies the rule for plural marks, or for neologisms like "kilo-octet" more often written now "kilooctet" even though it causes problems for the separate pronunciation of the double vowel "oo"). I suppose that in Catalan, one could use the middle dot to mark this syllable break in words like "kilo.octet". But the question of word-breaks is highly context-sensitive and language- dependant. It's hard to tell from a hyphen such as the one in the previous line, if it's a word-break hyphen or a compound-word composing hyphen. - Just look at this paragraph and you'll see several hyphens whose meaning differs even in English here. ;-)
