--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "i18n@..." <i18n@...> wrote:

> Nicholas Bodley wrote:
>
> >One thing I consider blatantly dumb is adding diacritical marks

(correct

> >term? Sorry; should know) for their decorative appearance, as,

for

> >instance, in Mötley Crüe,
> >
> >
>
> What is wrong with using characters or fragments as decorative

elements?

When I first learned about diacritics in Cree (from those who wrote
it) I was told that they were often used in a decorative sense. Of
course, strategic pointing, like Hebrew (so I was told), was the
more usual mode for Bibles and derived literature, but not always
achieved in handwriting or Cree publications. Consistent phonemic
pointing was more or less introduced to keep collation sequence in
bilingual dictionaries created by non-native linguists lined up
(back in the 80's).

I had not really experienced this as a problem until recently when I
started searching Cree dictionaries for Marco in the fall and found
that collation sequence is drastically different in different
publications. I then saw that Unicode has hundreds of precomposed
syllabics, each character is represented with each possible
diacritic and diacritic combination. Since these diacritics are not
normally used in a consistent manner by a large part of the Cree
population, what is happening to the Unicode Cree codecharts now?

Suzanne McCarthy