Random memory

[pne]

When I told my father about Esperanto, he thought it would be silly for a proposed International Auxiliary Language to require unusual diacritics, since that could only hinder its acceptance; using the straight Roman alphabet, with digraphs if necessary, would have made more sense to him.

(Interestingly enough, this was probably less of a problem back in the typewriter era, since you could put non-spacing diacritics such as circumflex accents over any letter you want… which is also, I believe, what accounts for the quaint single-vertical-line and double-vertical-line diacritics found in Marshallese: caused by overtyping an apostrophe or a quotation mark, respectively, over the vowel using a typewriter.)

Comments

[pne.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, I think ŝ might only be in there for Esperanto... I can't think of any other languages that use it.

The eki.ee letter database (http://www.eki.ee/letter/) doesn't know of any other languages using it (http://www.eki.ee/letter/chardata.cgi?search=s+with+circumflex), either.

Z-circumflex isn't "missing", per se, though, since the Unicode philosophy is that you can combine any letter with any diacritical mark; the precomposed letters are there mostly for round-trip convertability with "legacy" character sets and I get the feeling that they're somehow not quite the "proper" way to do things.

But fonts and rendering systems generally do a better job for precomposed characters :p

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

Z-circumflex isn't "missing", per se, though, since the Unicode philosophy is that you can combine any letter with any diacritical mark; the precomposed letters are there mostly for round-trip convertability with "legacy" character sets and I get the feeling that they're somehow not quite the "proper" way to do things.

Yes, I agree... :P My beef isn't so much that there are characters "missing", but that the selection of which character+diacritic combinations are included and which aren't seems arbitrary (at best) or Eurocentric (at worst).

But fonts and rendering systems generally do a better job for precomposed characters :p

True... how true...

[pne.livejournal.com]

the selection of which character+diacritic combinations are included and which aren't seems arbitrary (at best) or Eurocentric (at worst).

True, true.