Re: Click letters in ISO 639-3 and Registry (long)

On 8 Oct 2018, at 13:29, Mark Davis ☕️ <[email protected]> wrote:

> BTW, as for 02BC, in CLDR we ended up mapping that to 2019, because nobody is consistent about the distinction. (The danger of having two identical characters, not separated by script.) 

That was a bad idea. I’ve been publishing material in the Hawaiian language for some time now (Alice, Looking-Glass, the Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter, and more in preparation).

It is NOT possible to read Hawaiian narrative texts (you know, with conversational dialogue between characters, using quotation marks and nested quotation marks) if the quotation marks and the glottal stop are identical. Whatever the origin of the modifier letter apostrophe, if it is not distinguished from the quotation marks, the text becomes illegible. We found that retaining the circular shape of the dot in the comma-shaped 02BC but increasing the size of the character to 140% of the original makes a good, legible character.

At some stage (in my non-existent abundant spare time) I should write a Unicode Technical Note about this. But the status quo is not acceptable to actual readers of the language. (Same goes for Sāmoan and Tongan.) 

Michael Everson
_______________________________________________
Ietf-languages mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages