On 04/02/2012 04:05 AM, [email protected] wrote:
I appreciate your careful attitude considering the possibility that the found short vertical strings are formed under the influence of Chinese typography. So, for further discussion, we need an UCS Yi materials with vertical text that has no influence from Chinese typography? How to evaluate the influence? If the book has a colophone in Chinese, it should be excluded?
It is not the influence of Chinese typography that I'm concerned with so much (since that probably goes back many hundreds of years!), but the limitations of the software that was used to typeset the book and the biases and assumptions of the people running the software. If the software is capable of both options, and the people managing the typesetting process are comfortably literate in Yi and familiar with its vertical habits in handwritten texts, then we can consider the results of their work to be correct. But if the software is only capable of typsetting characters upright and not sideways, this will obviously be the result regardless of typographic preference. Also if the people typesetting the book are familiar with Chinese but not with Yi, they might assume that these characters, which like ideographs also fit in fixed-size boxes, should behave the same as Chinese. This is a reasonable assumption. But it may not be correct. ~fantasai
