Re: Request for Inclusion of Subscript for the English Letter “y”

[Asmus Freytag]

On 11/6/2024 3:41 AM, Christoph Päper via Unicode wrote:
> Thanks to Asmus Freytag for a very good synopsis of the current state 
> of affairs.
>>
>> In mathematical notation, any character can be a super or subscript, …
>>
>> There is generic use of (mostly) superscript numbers in text, …
>>
>> There are other notations, mainly phonetic, that have super/subscript 
>> forms but do not//need recursive subscripting (…), the super or 
>> subscript form often acts pretty much like any other letter in the 
>> notation, except for its shape. Common to these notations is that 
>> there's a fixed set of such shapes; they don't even cover a full 
>> basic alphabet; (…).
>>
> In other words, linguists need to provide proof of prior use for 
> superscript and subscript (and also small capital) letters (mostly 
> Latin, but also several Greek and some Cyrillic) for them to be 
> encoded individually.
Correct, it needs to be proven (supported by evidence) that the forms 
are unique elements of the notation, because each has a unique purpose 
and meaning.
>>
>> (…) In text, the plain text does not carry font information and it is 
>> fully acceptable to render the result in any font that supports the 
>> letters in question. (…)
>>
>> In math notation, you have the situation that mathematicians have 
>> used the contrast between different font shapes to carry meaning. (…)
>>
>> Having the character for all shape variants used for variables 
>> encoded directly makes this near plaintext form very powerful. (…)
>>
>> (…): the additions for phonetic notations will never cover the 
>> generic use of math, while the few styled alphabets for math do 
>> nothing for general text use. (…)
>>
> Mathematicians, on the other hand, did not need to prove that each and 
> every Latin letter, in upper and lower cases, had already been used in 
> all of the typographic styles. They simply got encoded as complete 
> sets (i.e. “math alphabets”) under the mere /assumption/ that there 
> was existing usage.

Correct. It had been an established fact of mathematical notation that a 
full (Basic Latin) set of these form part of conventional mathematical 
notation. It's nothing to do with "assumption"; the documented nature of 
the use is as a set.

> However, Unicode still implausibly claims that it won’t encode 
> something – the “missing” Latin superscript, subscript and smallcaps 
> letters in particular – just for “completeness”.
There is no phonetic use that is a "set". Most of the desire for 
"completeness" comes from users who have an interest in using these to 
spell out words, rather than to have a more complete rendition of 
existing phonetic text.
>
> That’s a bit frustrating and inefficient. So much discussion and 
> confusion could have been avoided if Unicode had just pragmatically 
> added full basic (i.e. 26-letter) Latin alphabets in superscript, 
> subscript and smallcaps early on. One practical disadvantage, with the 
> missing ones being added gradually and only after sufficient proof of 
> existing usage has been provided, is that fonts need to be updated 
> over time and fallbacks to other fonts need to be employed in the 
> meantime, which leads to unaesthetic results.

This is as maybe.

One advantage of encoding only characters in actual use is that they can 
be given the correct and specific properties at time of encoding. For 
phonetic and other "alphabetic" use, there is no inherent guarantee that 
shapes that are derived from the basic alphabetic form are all mutually 
consistent in their use. Which is another way the mathematical sets are 
distinct.

A./

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