From: "Patrick Andries" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin a �crit : > >>However I advise removal of the note "Catalan" under U+0140 and > >>U+013F, and perhaps replacement of the whole note with �for Catalan > >>use U+006C U+00B7� (resp. U+004C). > >> > Did you get an answer on this ? Why is there no decomposition associated > to this character ? > > Also did somewhat mention why U+0140 is even in Unicode since it could > be considered (by ignorami like me) as a precomposed character (l + > middle dot) ? Is it due to the polysemy of the middle dot ?
I thought it was already answered in this list by a Catalan speaking contributor: the sequence L+middle-dot in Catalan is NOT a combining sequence. The middle dot in Catalan plays a role similar to an hyphen between syllables, to mark a distinction with words where, for example a double-L would create an alternate reading. The dot indicates that each L must be read distinctly (or read with a long or emphatic L). In French for example we have words like "maille" to be read as /maj/, and the same "-ill-" written diphtongs after another vowel occur in Catalan. But French will not write "-ill-" if it occurs between two vowels where the two L must have the sound L (if this occurs in french, only 1 L is written, and the emphatic/long sound is not marked). Catalan has this orthograph, and writes the emphatic/long L distinctly. So it needs a symbol for that. The middle-dot is then considered in Catalan as a letter, that will occur in the middle of words. I don't know if the middle-dot can be used in Catalan as a cadidate position for a line break with hyphenation: if yes, is it kept before the hyphen, or is the middle-dot used alone, or is the middle-dot replaced by a regular hyphen? I don't know. But if the middle-dot must be replaced by a hyphen, then it is a punctuation (similar to hyphens used in compound-words). But in Catalan, the middle dot should not be kerned into the preceding uppercase L, like it would appear if it was considered equivalent to <L-middle-dot>. Catalan has no use of such decomposition, and if such decomposition had existed, it would have been into L + combining left-middle-dot, and not the same character. If there's something really missing for Catalan, it's a middle-dot letter with general category "Lo", and combining class 0 (i.e. NOT combining). It's unfortunate that almost all legacy Catalan text transcoded to Unicode are based on the middle-dot symbol (the one mapped in ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15) which is not seen by Unicode as a letter (Lo) but as a symbol only.
