On 8 Aug 2010, at 17:56, António MARTINS-Tuválkin wrote: > On 2010.08.06, 10:06, Michael Everson <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Recently I wrote a proposal to encode TOP HALF SECTION SIGN. See >> http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3740.pdf > > It is, as usual, very interesting to read on its own — once more, thank > you, Michael!
You're very welcome. It's nice to know that people enjoy what one has written. >>> “Palaeotype”, a pre-IPA phonetic alphabet used by Alexander Ellis in >>> his massive and classic four-volume work on early English >>> pronunciation, published in 1869. The TURNED COMMA indicates >>> nasalization, so (in modern IPA) a⸲ means [ã]. Palaeotype also uses >>> the punctuation marks , (COMMA) and ,, (two COMMAs side by side) and . >>> (FULL STOP) and ., (FULL STOP and COMMA) and ; (SEMICOLON) for various >>> purposes. It is not proposed to re-encode all of these as modifier >>> letters; > > Why not? It is not that there’s not already a large group of “duplicated” > modifier letters that were historically hacked as such from punctuation > marks, and that is a good thing. We all know why is good to have U+02BC > separated from U+2019, or U+02CD from U+005F, and a bunch of others: Word > count, insertion point movement, etc. Because I knew I could get the two characters I needed that way without a fight. Palaeotype is interesting and important, but it's not really "processed" in the same way that other things are. So accepting that it just uses punctuation in a particular way seems just fine to me. There are some other peculiar features of Palaeotype however which I will look into in due course. Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
