On Sat, 2 Feb 2013 15:57:26 +0100 Joó Ádám <[email protected]> wrote:
> The > dot above i and j may be considered as a glyphic feature, but it can > also be considered as the addition of a diacritic for whtever reason. > The reason of course was typographical, but from an encoding point of > view this does not necessarily matter. Cf. the use of diaresis in > English words like coöperation, which is also typographical, > nevertheless explicitly encoded. The diaeresis potentially contrasts words; it indicates a syllable boundary, and prevents hybrids like ‘zoology’, where the vowel of the first syllable has been infected by the 'oo'. (For actually contrasting words, it’s vary rare - ‘coöp’ v. ‘coop’ is the best I could come up with quickly, and the former is normally spelt ‘co-op’.) Richard.
