[Biblical-languages] Apostrophe / Coronis

Patrick Rourke ptrourke at methymna.com
Sat May 3 16:46:28 EDT 2003


Ah, I see what the problem is now. Sorry, I should have thought that 
out more carefully; I only noticed the concerns with how the characters 
*look*, and that is the responsibility of the font designer and not the 
typesetter or author.


1. The apostrophe

The apostrophe used to mark elision is a spacing character.  You should 
use 2019.

The elision mark is a spacing character, not an "overstrike" character. 
The kerning should put it close to the character it follows, but as it 
is NOT a diacritical modifying the character it precedes, it should not 
be treated as a combining character.  Rather it modifies the space it 
occupies.

For Greek-oriented fonts, 2019 and 0027 should have indistinguishable 
glyphs because the use of 0027 for the apostrophe is very common, even 
if not correct.

2019 is a paired character (with 2018). 0027 is not.  The reason 2019 
is recommended for use as an apostrophe is to resolve a directional 
ambiguity in cases where a leading apostrophe is needed (see Michael 
Everson: On the apostrophe and quotation mark, with a note on Egyptian 
transliteration characters, Working Group Document ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 
N2043, 1999-07-24 ).  This seems to me to be overclever.  I think 0027 
should exclusively be an apostrophe, and 2018 and 2019 exclusively be 
quotation marks - Everson's solution carries the semantic ambiguity of 
0027 over to 2019 in order to solve the directional ambiguity, while my 
solution would resolve both ambiguities.

Michael Everson, however, is one of the main architects of the Unicode 
Standard, and I am not, so you should do as he says (and the most 
recent published version of the Unicode Standard says) and not as I do. 
  :-)

When I use 0027 in my site, it is due to laziness, and will have to be 
corrected. I'll cite you in the acknowledgements to thank you for 
pointing this out.

 > Since the coronis marks elision (krasis) it should look and behave
 > like a breathing mark.  If the character 1FBD is coronis, I would 
think
 > that it should be an overstriking character.  Practically, would we 
not
 > just use the smooth breathing mark combinations for a vowel with
 > coronis?

Coronis A:

The coronis used in crasis IS a combining character. It modifies the 
space between the two characters, and so should be treated that way.  
I'm not quite sure what to do here, and would follow Haramboulos's 
recommendations, as a standard is better than no standard. The easiest 
source for this character is Smyth section 62.


Coronis B

There are two kinds of coronis (coronis is a glyph name, not a 
character name): for the first kind, mentioned above, you have one 
issue; for the second kind, which is a character used to mark the ends 
of sections in a text, you need a spacing character.
Here are the notes I put together at one point on this "coronis". They 
are merely quotations from some authorities, and have no real analysis 
with them.

http://zeno.stoa.org/~ptr/unicode/appendices/coronis.html

Tonos

Haramboulos is exactly right about using the tonos for polytonic 
acutes.  Remember that THE SHAPES IN THE UNICODE STANDARD CODE CHARTS 
ARE NOT NORMATIVE.  If a character from the basic Greek range is used 
in a polytonic context, the font should display an acute accent that 
harmonizes with its context. Haramboulos rule follows the Unicode 
Standard's canonical normalizations, and those should be considered 
absolutely prescriptive. If you don't like the looks of the 
diacriticals, complain to the font designer.

The new characters being added to the Unicode standard for the use of 
classicists (in Greek) were I'm pretty sure proposed by the Thesaurus 
Linguae Graecae, probably with reference to Haramboulos' work.  Many 
others have been proposed.  I don't know how public the proposals are, 
but they are very thorough and probably won't be exhausted for some 
time.

Patrick Rourke



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