On Tue, 7 Sep 2004 14:07:16 +0100 (BST), Andrew Dunbar <hippietrail@...> wrote:

> --- John Cowan <cowan@...> wrote:
>> Muke Tever scripsit:
>>
>> > So, tangentially: Where are we proposing to put
>> > the L-shaped symbol?
>> > Not being part of the orthography, it doesn't
>> > _actually_ belong in the Romanization. (But
>> > then, this seems to be flexible; people there
>> > also like to go around casing transliterations of
>> > non-cased scripts; I'm just picky in that area.)
>
> Just as Russian dictionaries almost always have an
> acute accent to show the stressed syllable which is
> never used in regular Russian, and the "e with dots"
> which is used by some and not by others in regular
> writing.

True, and we do anyway put that in, as well as macrons in the Latin headwords.

>> After all, the syllabication dots don't belong to
>> English orthography either, but English dictionaries
>> commonly use them in headwords.

So far I've been putting hyphenation on a line of its own, which is less intrusive to the headword (especially in languages where hyphenation affects the spelling), and keeps 'hyphenation' separate from 'syllabification' (the latter is, for me anyway, much more complicated).

> On Wiktionary some users have been using the Catalan
> middle dot which is fine so far. But Unicode actually
> has another character designed for this job. And if we
> use the middle dot in all Latin-script languages, it's
> not going to work for Catalan!

Actually there shouldn't be any conflict. The Catalan middle dot _does_ represent a syllable/hyphenation break, and (if I understand correctly) is replaced by a hyphen when actually used at a line break.

> My policy is to strive to do what good print diction-
> aries do. There is a chicken & egg issue with Unicode
> support. Many people say don't use the features until
> the support comes but the people who make the support
> also say it's not worth making unless people are
> trying to use it. I think Wiktionary would be doing a
> service to the Unicode-using community by using
> these features and thus making a need for the support
> to come. We already use the double combining macron
> though I've never seen it work on my own computer.

Indeed. It'd also be nice to have Egyptian hieroglyphics already. The wiki already has a system to display them with graphics but apparently only for the purpose of having "pretty pictures"; they won't display in running text and they can't be used as page titles. We can't even properly _transliterate_ Egyptian words without the "3"-like aleph sign -- do we have that yet?


*Muke!
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