1ˢᵗ, 2ⁿᵈ, 3ʳᵈ, 4ᵗʰ … 9ᵗʰ

[Fredrick Brennan]

Hello!

With Unicode superscript lowercase letters, dates with superscript ordinal 
indicators in English can be written in plaintext, e.g.:

1?? of January, 2?? of February, 3?? of March, 4?? of April, and so on.

The only problem I've encountered is in font fallback; fonts are more likely to 
contain ? than the other letters due to its use in Pe?h-?e-j? and IPA. So, ? often 
appears in a different style in the word 2?? for example. This can be somewhat 
avoided by using a font which supports all the letters, such as Gentium Plus, EB 
Garamond, etc.

However, I have a feeling that this use is an abuse of the standard, but that brings 
up an interesting comparison with the ordinal indicators for Spanish, Portuguese 
(& other languages?), the masculine ? and the feminine ?.

If anyone has time to answer, why is one an abuse and the other not, if indeed 1?? is 
an abuse as I think?

If it's not an abuse, then that could perhaps be an argument for the necessity of 
encoding ????????? ???????? ?????? s???? ?, as й is one of the few letters without a 
combining counterpart in Cyrillic Extended-A or Extended-B. (Of course, no 
breaking spaces would need to be used to write Russian 2-й if this character were 
to be encoded, e.g. as U+32 U+A0 U+XXXX, while no-break spaces aren't needed 
for Latin.

Best,
Fred Brennan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/attachments/20201215/30269c84/attachment.htm>