[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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