umlaut

[Mark Odegard]

Mark Mandel:
>On the branching topic of the proper or preferred way to alphabetize Roman
>letters outside the 26 "standard" ones, I call to your attention an
>upcoming holiday (from
>http://www.egt.ie/standards/iso10646/wynnyogh/thorn.html )

[whack]

We are getting into the official ISO nomenclature for all the squiggles the
drape themseves around Roman letters, as well as the names of letters which
do not occur in the Roman alphabet.

MM gives a URL for one of Michael Everson's pages. It had been a while since
I visited them, and some things have changed. I remember Everson's very
stimulating discussion of the 'apostrophe' as we call it in English, and,
from the point of view of Unicode, grammar, writing systems, and typography,
what it exactly stands for (Whoopf! We need a whole block of apostrophes and
open/close quotes just to cover all the distinct cases!).

Anyway to move this 'branching topic' into a further branch, let me first
highly recommend a *superb* piece of freeware: SC Unipad:

http://www.unipad.org/main/index.html

Essentialy, Unipad is the Unicode version of MS Character set, with lots and
lots of added yummies. If you are so inclined, you can touch type in IPA,
with the full load of diacritics. Soon enough, even Linear B will be
available.

If you click on the far far right tool bar, where it gets cut off, you get
the Unipad version of the character set. The use is quite intuitive (but
open new under file). When you fiddle with the character set, you see that
you get ALL the official Unicode names of ALL these characters.

Which leads us back on topic. The dictionaries are gonna be running to catch
up with all these names, and maybe, trying to give a brief explanation why a
tilde is not the same as "combining Greek perispomeni".

The net groups are also going to get all sorts of questions about exactly
what all these squiggles represent -- particularly when the fonts and
software catches up with the demands of Unicode. We can be certain that
certain rock groups will not merely have decorative tremas over certain
letters of their band name, but even combining Greek perispomenis.

SC Unipad is a better way to introduce yourself to Unicode, but the Unicode
pages themselves should be explored.

http://www.unicode.org/

I am starting to ask. Has Unicode taken cognizance of the use of H to
represent Indo-European 'laryngeals', and utility of creating a distinct
character for it? The H1 PIE laryngeal might be an aitch, or a glottal stop,
depending on context. H2 seems to be X/kh, as in Bach or loch; H3 would be
H2 with lip rounding, khw, approximately as in 'queen'.
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