Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Dunbar <hippietrail@...> wrote:
> > --- Michael Everson <everson@...> wrote:
> > > At 20:26 -0400 2004-08-01, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> > > I am not sure the Hebrew points count as "letters",
> > > though -- in which case it may not be appropriate
> > > to say that the Hebrew script is used as an
> > > alphabet when pointed.
> >
> > Then we need a solid definition of what a letter is.
> > And to preempt we will also need solid definitions of
> > what a diacritic is.
>
> That's not going to be easy. How do you handle the German umlaut
> symbol, which can manifest itself as a following 'e'? And what

<h> has been plausibly called a diacritic in the English consonantal
digraphs.

> about abbreviations such as LATIN LETTER B WITH STROKE for 'ber' (as
> in Northumbland with barred 'b' for Northumberland) or p with a
> stroke through the descender to indicate 'par' or 'per', as in 'pt'
> (with barred 'p') for 'part' or 'ex pte' (barred p) for 'ex parte'
> that used to be used in England a few hundred years ago.

They're abbreviations, hence outside the question.

> Actually, don't we have a definition of a diacritic? Isn't it a
> Unicode combining character? We might have to make it circular to
> cope with Thai - one that would normally be a Unicode combining
> character.

I don't know what "Unicode combining character" means, but surely there
are some of those that aren't diacritics?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...