Muke Tever wrote:

>
> Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@...> wrote:
> > i18n@... wrote:
> >> > > So you are referring to the glyphs in particular fonts as opposed to the
> >> > > abstract characters themselves?
> >> >
> >> > What is an "abstract character"?
> >>
> >> Well, a brief way to describe it (since you mentioned you are not
> >> interested in learning about encodings) is "that which is represented by
> >> the glyph".
> >>
> >> E.g. the concept of "the letter A" as opposed to the glyph on a page
> >> that represents the letter A.
> >>
> >> Maybe when you said "The closest we have to real angle brackets in standard
> >> fonts is single-guillemets" what you meant was "I consider the glyphs
> >> for single-guillemets in standard fonts to be a closer substitute then
> >> the glyphs for the less-than/greater-than brackets for the glyphs that
> >> are not present for angle brackets"?
> >
> > What is "the concept of 'the letter A'"?
>
> The underlying A-ness that a user of the Latin alphabet sees in any letter A,
> whether the glyph be serif, sans-serif, script, blackletter, illuminated, or
> composed of rocks laid out on the beach of a desolate island.

Ah. I thought that might be what the nameless Barry was getting at.
There is no such thing. Mr. Knuth supposedly put a great deal of effort
into trying to identify such "underlying A-ness," but if you look at the
A's from a wide variety of fonts -- especially novelty ones -- you'll
find that letters that in context are clearly A cannot be identified as
A on their own.

> The letter's emic form, which computer encodings purport to encode.
>
> > How is your paraphrase any different, aside from excessive wordiness,
> > from what I said?
>
> Apparently the willingness to overload operators is not paralleled by a
> willingness to overload technical terminology. ;)
>
> The alternative interpretation of what you said would be that the underlying
> form of real angle brackets is closer to the underlying form of single-guillemets
> than that of the greater- and less-than signs, which is apparently not what you
> meant to say, as this doesn't seem to agree with your stated reasons for preferring
> the guillemets.

It may well be, since the brackets and the guillemets have obtuse
angles, the greater/less have acute angles.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...