A sign/abbreviation for "magister"

Wed Oct 31 07:34:53 CDT 2018

Thank you for your feedback.

On 30/10/2018 at 22:52, Khaled Hosny wrote:

> > First, ARABIC LETTER SUPERSCRIPT ALEPH U+0671.
> > But it is a vowel sign. Many letters put above are called superscript 
> > when explaining in English.
> 
> As you say, this is a vowel sign not a superscript letter, so the name
> is a misnomer at best. It should have been called COMBINING ARABIC
> LETTER ALEF ABOVE, similar to COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER A. In Arabic
> it is called small or dagger alef.

Thank you for this information. Indeed the current French translation 
named it:
0670 DIACRITIQUE VOYELLE ARABE ALIF EN CHEF
* l'appellation anglaise de ce caractère est erronée
http://hapax.qc.ca/ListeNoms-10.0.0.txt
Translation:
0670 COMBINING ARABIC VOWEL ALEF ABOVE
* the English designation of this character is mistaken

Sorry for mistyping its code point, and for forgetting these facts.
What’s surprising, then, may be the facility it was named using SUPERSCRIPT, 
while superscripts seemed to be disliked in the Standard.

I note, now, that it should be called COMBINING ARABIC LETTER ALEF ABOVE,
as you indicate. (Translating to French as DIACRITIQUE LETTRE ARABE ALIF EN CHEF).

> 
> > There is the range U+FC5E..U+FC63 (presentation forms).
> 
> That is a backward compatiplity block no one is supposed to use, there
> are many such backward comatipility presentation forms even of Latin
> script (U+FB00..U+FB4F).
> 
> So I don’t see what makes you think, based on this, that Unicode is
> favouring Arabic or other scripts over Latin.

Indeed it doesn’t. Sorry about my assumption, but I mainly cited Arabic 
first because its name starts with an A, and I remembered it uses a 
“SUPERSCRIPT” in running text.

Other scripts have:
10FC MODIFIER LETTER GEORGIAN NAR
# <super> 10DC
2D6F TIFINAGH MODIFIER LETTER LABIALIZATION MARK
# <super> 2D61
A69C MODIFIER LETTER CYRILLIC HARD SIGN
#  044A
A69D MODIFIER LETTER CYRILLIC SOFT SIGN
#  044C
[but the latter two are for dialectology]
These are in the Duployan block:
1BCA2 SHORTHAND FORMAT DOWN STEP
1BCA3 SHORTHAND FORMAT UP STEP
because vertical alignment is significant in stenography.
So it is in Latin script when superscript us used as an 
abbreviation indicator.
However I see that the subjoiners and subjoined letters 
are obeying to another scheme than what led to super- or 
subscript.

On 31/07/2018 at 08:27, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
>
> > Making a safe distinction is beyond my knowledge, safest is not to discriminate.
>
> Yes. The easiest way to not discriminate is to not use titles in mailing 
> list discussions. That's what everybody else does, and what I highly 
> recommend.

OK. That is sound practice, which I observed a long time, until I felt best using Dr. 
Thanks for clearing it up.

On 30/10/2018 at 21:34, Julian Bradfield via Unicode wrote:

> The practice of using superscripts to end abbreviations is alive and
> well in manuscript - I do it myself in writting notes for myself. For
> example, "condition" I will often write as "cond<sup>n</sup>", and
> "equation" as "eq<sup>n</sup>".

That tends to prove that legibility is suboptimal without superscripts, 
even in note/draft style, and consequently, in machine processed plain text 
“only more so” (quoting an expression from Ken Whistler’s reply to 
James Kass on 30/10/2018 05:54).

> > in the 17ᵗʰ or 18ᵗʰ century to keep it only for ordinals. Should Unicode 
> 
> What do you mean, for ordinals? If you mean 1st, 2nd etc., then there
> is not now (when superscripting looks very old-fashioned) and never
> has been any requirement to superscript them, as far as I know -
> though since the OED doesn't have an entry for "1st", I can't easily
> check.

Then French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish seem to be the only locales having 
superscript ordinal indicator requirements, or preferences if you prefer. 

The following forum has a comprehensive explanation for English, and for Romance 
languages except French:
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/111265/should-ordinal-indicators-be-inline
Especially it explains where the American English lining ordinal indicators came from.

English Wikipedia’s Ordinal indicator article 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_indicator
states that ordinal indicators and superscript letters don’t share the same glyph, 
which would explain why there was an intent to project a proposal for encoding French 
ordinal indicators. (But I advised that that would be a waste of time, as Unicode’s 
preformatted superscripts are working out of the box.) 

Preformatted Unicode superscript small letters are meeting the French superscript 
requirement, that is found in:
http://www.academie-francaise.fr/abreviations-des-adjectifs-numeraux
(in French). This brief article focuses on the spelling of the indicators, 
without questioning the fact that they are superscript.

On 31/08/2018 at 06:54, Janusz S. Bień via Unicode wrote:
[…]
> BTW, I find it strange that nobody refers to an old thread
> 
> https://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2016-m12/0117.html

I thought at linking to some of my previous e-mails and would probably have picked 
this one. Thanks for remembering, and for reminding.

Best regards,

Marcel