On 26 Mar 2012, at 13:35, Denis Jacquerye wrote: > So far the linguistic atlases I have seen extensively use this > combining letter mechanism, with diacritics changing the meaning of > the combining letter or of the base letter. > > There are a whole lot of notations that could simply be base combining > letter + combining diacritics, but if you consider their meaning, > would have to be encoded a their own combining letter with diacritics > on the model of combining a-umlaut, etc... This is not coherent with > the decomposition model. > > Having some of the combining letters with diacritics encoded as single > characters and other combining letters with diacritics encoded as > combining letters with separate combining diacritics based on what > meaning they have is as erroneous as having new precomposed characters > because of their meaning. Would we encode ɛ̱ because it is a specific > meaning in some language? Obviously no.
Encoding is supposed to be "language-independent" but that's theoretical, in practice it cannot be independent to _some_ language. And the "business-language" for encoding seems to have been english so far, at least as far as I understand Unicode. > So why are we encoding ä when > it is a combining diacritic but not ẽ? That is a reminiscence of the history of type-encoding. > > The fact that combining c-cedilla is a precedent doesn't make it any saner. > > For example a-breve is a separate letter in Romanian, and it is as > well in the Atlasul linguistic romîn serie noua, just like the > a-umlaut is in German dialectology. But in other dialectology works > such as Atlas linguistique de la France, a-breve is just a breve a, > not a different letter. > You'll then end up with combining a-breve as a single diacritic for > Romanian but combining a and combining breve for other languages. Yet > the non-diacritic forms, i.e. regular letters would be represented by > the same character sequence in Romanian or other languages, NFC ă or > NFD ă. > The same could be said for a-umlaut/diaeresis depending on how people > are using it. > > Denis Moyogo Jacquerye > <combining_a-breve-1-ALRsn.jpg><combining_a-breve-2-ALRsn.jpg>
