Unicode Mail List Archive: Re: Exemplar Characters (original) (raw)

Next message: Mark E. Shoulson: "Re: Exemplar Characters"

Christopher JS Vance wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 09:52:12PM -0800, Doug Ewell wrote:
>
>> I tend to think of this as a religious war. There will always be those
>> who feel English can be written perfectly well with straight ASCII, and
>> others who feel it cannot be written properly without curly quotes and
>> arrows and symbols and at least four types of dashes and every Latin
>> letter used in a loanword or name that appears in an English sentence.
>> [1] These two groups will never agree on what the "exemplar" characters
>> for a given language are.
>
>
> The letters taught as their alphabet (or other type of repertoire) to
> school students with that first language would prima facie be correct.
> It's up to the speakers of the language concerned to decide whether
> something is a letter or letter-plus-accent, and we know these
> decisions are inconsistent between languages, and sometimes even in
> the same language across time.

Even that may not be enough. I'm starting to agree with Doug. You have
to learn the vowel-points when you learn Hebrew, and while I'm not 100%
sure that I agree with Jony that they should not be considered Exemplar
characters, he definitely has a point. Certainly in ordinary text you'll
see maybe three or four vowel-points on a page (at most!) And they don't
fit into the model of letter vs. letter+accent; under that model does
the accent itself deserve to be considered a character in its own right?

~mark

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