At 09:40 -0400 2005-08-14, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

>>Typically, Ogham fonts with a stemline include bits of the stemline
>>on either side of the letter -|||- so that the letters can join
>>together. Your fonts don't, which means that you would have to type
>>an inter-letter stemline in order to get the words not to run
>>together. That means that you can't type Ogham text (in the sense
>>of something you could search for correctly on the internet for
>>example) with your font, because instead of searching for MUCOI you
>>would have to search for M-U-C-O-I.
>
>You're wrong. If you don't know what you're talking about, you shouldn't
>talk.

Well, let's see.

"Typically, Ogham fonts with a stemline include bits of the stemline
on either side of the letter -|||- so that the letters can join
together."

I'm not wrong about this. Typically, Ogham font glyphs *do* include a
stemline on either side of the strokes of the letter. In this way you
can type two letters next to each other and they don't run together.

"Your fonts don't [include bits of the stemline on either side of the
letter], which means that you would have to type an inter-letter
stemline in order to get the words not to run together."

Are you saying that your fonts *do* include such a stemline? They
certainly do not in the chart on page 341. Indeed, if you look at
page 344, you find that initial Q, C, S, L, N, M, and D do not have a
stemline attached to them, as can be seen by the tiny space between
them and the following letter.

I assumed that your font used the letters as on page 341, and that to
string them together with a stemline, you inserted an additional
stemline character between each letter to get them to link up. Of
course, if your font does not do that, it is likely that it has both
shapes with the stemline and shapes without them.

If either of these analyses are incorrect, perhaps you will enlighten
us as to the encoding structure of your font.

>>The Unicode encoding for Ogham assumes that each letter will have
>>its stemline inherent in the font glyph so that the letters attach
>>correctly; there is also an OGHAM SPACE MARK which would have the
>>shape of a stemline can be used between words. [...]
>
>I really don't give a damn what "The Unicode encoding for Ogham
>assumes." It was not available to me at the time.

I was not criticizing you for not using Unicode fonts in the
preparation of WWS. I was pointing out that because Ogham fonts make
use of an inherent stemline, a stemline-space-mark has been
introduced to permit word separation without breaking the stemline. I
was also not criticizing you for breaking the stemline in WWS, since
the examples benefit from the breaking of the stemline.

This encoding structure is also followed in the Irish Standard for
8-bit Ogham fonts.

>Nowadays, anyone in the world could reproduce much of the content of
>WWS with an off-the-shelf OS. In 1993, that was not an option.

Yes, and I am pleased to point out that much of that can be done
because of the work I have been doing for more than a decade, to
encode minority and lesser-used scripts in the Universal Character
Set.

> > Damian is, however, incorrect in his use of the
> > word boustrophedon here, and I would have no problems telling him so.
> > A boustrophedon text has a line-break where the directionality of the
> > text is reversed. That isn't the case in Ogham. As I said, a text may
>> begin on one side of a stone, go up over the top and down the other
>> side, but that is still as single line of text. There is no
>> line-break -- no field-ploughing, so to speak -- so boustrophedon is
>> not the correct term.
>>
> > I would also query Damian's description of the arrowhead as a "word
>> separator". Typically, the arrowheads are used more or less
>> decoratively on either end of a word or phrase.
>>
> > And yes, I consider myself an expert on Ogham. I do not venture to
>> compare myself with Damian, but I have no problem disagreeing with
> > him where he appears to be imprecise or in error.
>
>And have you published your great insights in, say, a journal of Celtic
>studies?

I cannot imagine what journal of Celtic studies would bother to
publish a note about Damian's use of the word boustrophedon in a book
about writing systems. My point, however, is that Damian's use of the
word to characterize Ogham writing is incorrect. because a
boustrophedon text has a line-break where the directionality of the
text is reversed, and that behaviour does not occur in the Ogham
corpus. Up-over-and-down in a single line of text is not
boustrophedon.
--
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com