At 12:50 -0700 2004-06-10, Asmus Freytag wrote:
That's a statement, not an argument. Nor does it address my contention that the phonetic extensions (all of them) that are styled Latin characters are in fact equivalent to mathematical usage in that in both cases you have a letter form that carries specific semantics based on what otherwise would be font style.
"Style" per se is applied to Mathematical characters, regularly, and meaningfully. Just because "script" is part of the name of U+0261 does not mean that "style" as in HTML markup is what makes it look like that; that's just not the case, and you can't read that much into the name. It is for the same reason that I chose the name "script" when ***I*** named the voiced palatoalveolar click. I recognized its shape as similar to some forms of script Q. There are other forms of script Q. I did not consider it to be "styled" in the same way.
By the way, I *made* the glyph out of U+0541 ARMENIAN LETTER JA, andd it looks a lot more like that than a script Q, so PLEEEAASE let's not jump overboard on a crusade to unify this character with a mathematical character, OK? To do so would be really very silly.
I disagree. Leave the math characters, please, to the math fonts. For instance, the flowery style we use now for the math block is waaaay to italic for harmonization with the use of the character in a phonetic context.
This is a glyphic argument that doesn't hold water. The font you use is well within the range of 'script' fonts that can be used for mathematical use. In fact our font is not even the best script font of that purpose.
I'm aware of that; I still do not think we should start encouraging linguists to go off into the mathematical characters and press them into service for phonetics. Letters are letters.
There is nothing magically different about mathematical usage. Mathematicians will be happy to use any of the existing phonetic letters if and when the fancy strikes them. Now that Unicode is widespread I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't any mathematicians already spelunking...
Mathematicians can do what they like.
That's an argument of convenience. The BMP will be full at some point in the very near future, and then there will be no choice. Opening the door for a historic extension makes a more sense than for a commonly used modern orthography.
There is no value to unifying this with the maths character just because *I* named it that way for reasons which you misconstrue.
I will be perfectly happy to rename the character LATIN LETTER VOICED PALATOAVEOLAR CLICK. It doesn't have an upper case property anyway.
That's just hiding the issue.
No, it's not. There is nothing particularly Q-like about the character in question; it's more JA-like anyway. It was a superficial identification I made; had I simply named it VOICED PALATOAVEOLAR CLICK, we would probably not be having this conversation.
In any case -- and I think this is the precedent I am looking for -- this is a "script" capital Q in the same way that U+0261 is a script g. It is **not** unified with U+210A SCRIPT SMALL G.
It's not a precedent, since the use of the word 'script' has different meaning in both cases.
No, it doesn't. Your mathematical "script" has a meaning which is different from the one which applies to the IPA [g] and from the one I had in mind when I named the character.
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
