Latin Letters Capital and Small Theta

Marcel Schneider charupdate at orange.fr
Sun Jun 12 05:41:10 CDT 2016


On Sat, 11 Jun 2016 18:20:12 -0600, Doug Ewell wrote:

> Marcel Schneider wrote:
> 
>> While some characters were retained, others were rejected, among which
>> the Latin Theta pair, but no mention is found of this rejection in the
>> Non-Approval Notices.
> 
> Lots of characters in proposals are rejected without rising to the level
> of explicit disapproval: "Look, we said NO, and don't ask us again." The
> Non-Approval Notices page starts with an extensive description of the
> difference.
> 
> At the same time, note that a few proposals, such as LATIN CAPITAL
> LETTER SHARP S, have risen phoenix-like from the ranks of
> non-approvaldom to become genuine encoded characters. 

Thank you for these hints, which moreover remember me the persistent case folding 
issue around the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S which is not round-trip neither 
and needs to be tailored, because its small letter is to be kept stable. 
Seen from here, tailoring the Greek small theta to get it the Latin way around 
becomes quite obvious:

Without tailoring:
ẞ ⇒ ß ⇒ SS
ϴ ⇒ θ ⇒ Θ

With tailoring:
ẞ ⇒ ß ⇒ ẞ
ϴ ⇒ θ ⇒ ϴ

Now I’m much likely to believe that theta-using Latin script writers are eventually 
better served with the UTCʼs not retaining a separate Latin theta, because 
tailoring this custom Greek casing pair presumably makes for a more streamlined 
implementation and a more user-friendly result, given that the font issue is 
spared. The more as for units like Ohm and prefixes like micro, Greek letters are 
preferred too, no matter what script they are used in.

[BTW, on Sun, 12 Jun 2016 00:20:12 +0200 (CEST) I wrote:
> According to Mr Everson in this thread, «Theta is perhaps the
> hardest to argue for» disunification:
> http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2008-m09/0076.html
> 
> Why so, is however non-obvious to me […]

But it is, since the thread was about IPA, so uppercase was not discussed.]


The question still remains whether in practice this working model could be 
unanimously accepted, given that at least somebody is preferring the regular 
Greek capital, presumably to get around the case folding issue.

Marcel



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