Re: [alreq] Terminology (#205)

I've found the passage in the _Standard_ that you may refer to (the link pointed to the other issue):

> In this section and the following section, the terms nonspacing mark and combining character
> are used interchangeably. The terms diacritic, accent, stress mark, Hebrew point, Arabic
> vowel, and others are sometimes used instead of nonspacing mark. (They refer to
> particular types of nonspacing marks.) Properly speaking, a nonspacing mark is any combining
> character that does not add space along the writing direction. For a formal definition
> of nonspacing mark, see Section 3.6, Combination.

where the definition of combining marks says:

> They include such characters as accents, diacritics, Hebrew points,
> Arabic vowel signs, and Indic matras.

So my reading is this: the _Standard_ recognises that these are different things, but uses them in the body of the text interchangeably (which it shouldn't, maybe it's just to be less repetitive to read). In other words, whilst they may all be combining marks, diacritical signs are not vowels, nor accents, nor Hebrew points etc.

Re. other languages using the Arabic script: I see that this document delimits its scope with Arabic and Persian. Realistically, though, it will be used either as a model, or without changes for all languages using the Arabic script (this here has been years in the making, by whom and when will the same be done for other contexts?). And probably this is reasonable, as most aspects that should be covered here will also be applicable for other languages. But I think we should be as inclusive in our outlook as possible, and make it as much as possible applicable to the Arabic script, rather than a couple of languages.

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Received on Wednesday, 20 November 2019 14:10:05 UTC