"Decorative diacritics" (Was: Re: "Kodak" )

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Doug Ewell" <dewell@...> wrote:

> Suzanne McCarthy <suzmccarth at yahoo dot com> wrote:
>
> > 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?
>
> Nothing will ever "happen" to them, in the sense of removing or
> deprecating the dotted and double-dotted characters. They are

perfectly

> good "Unified" syllabics, used not only in Cree but also in

Blackfoot

> and Carrier and Inuktitut and perhaps other languages.

I guess that I was hoping that the dotted and double dotted
characters might be deprecated and I just wasn't aware of it. It
does create several possible encodings for any word in Cree.

The problem here is that the precomposed characters, the syllabics
plus diacritic, do not represent a widespread indigenous use. There
was once a Cree elder known for using diacritics phonemically. This
skill was recognized as a skill particular to his family, his
specialty. It was remarked on as unusual. One family!

Suzanne McCarthy

>
> -Doug Ewell
> Fullerton, California
> http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/