- From: John Hudson <tiro@tiro.com>
- Date: Tue, 24 May 2011 16:35:12 -0700
- To: Lea Verou <leaverou@gmail.com>
- CC: www-style list <www-style@w3.org>
Lea Verou wrote: > In greek, we have accent marks that denote in which syllable you put the > stress on when pronnouncing a word. For example, in the word καλημέρα, > the accent mark is on the 6th character. However, when words are written > in all UPPERCASE, those accent marks are removed (for example, ΚΑΛΗΜΕΡΑ > for the same word, not ΚΑΛΗΜΈΡΑ). The only case where an accent mark is > included in a capital letter, is when it's the first letter of the word > (e.g. when it's a name or it's at the beginning of a sentence). This > rule is not followed by the aforementioned CSS rules, as they just use > the corresponding uppercase unicode character, making those declarations > completely unusable in greek websites. This is something that may be handled at the glyph level, using contextual substitution lookups in the font. The rule is not quite as simple as you describe: if an accent falls on the first letter of a two vowel sequence, indicating that this is not pronounced as a diphthong but as two separate vowel sounds, then when the accent is removed in all-cap setting a dialytika (diaeresis) must be added to the second vowel to prevent confusion with the diphthong. Handling this at the glyph display level, rather than in character transformation, has some benefits. Firstly, it is a convention that came about after the practice of writing accents and breathing marks to the left of uppercase letters developed, and I have yet to find examples of that practice prior to the 19th Century. This means that although it is the norm for all modern Greek typography, it was not the norm for most of the history of accented Greek text, in which accents were frequently written above Greek uppercase letters (or even to the right!). There also exist examples of smallcap Greek letters used as transcription of uncial texts, again with marks above the letters rather than suppressed. These variant typographic treatments are possible if the handling of marks in all caps and smallcaps is made at the glyph level, e.g. using the OpenType <calt> feature, which users can then apply or disable as they wish. Also, I am not sure that a case transformation that strips marks at the character level is losslessly reversible, whereas if it is handled at the glyph level the character string is preserved. JH
Received on Tuesday, 24 May 2011 23:35:41 UTC