Re: Vallian (was: How to minimize "words")

On 2/24/07, Jeff Rollin <jeff.rollin@...> wrote:
> My German is too rusty to be able to tell you whether *"The _I gave [him] a
> hat_ man speaks English" would be possible instead of
>
> "Der Mann, _dem ich einen Hut gegeben habe_, spricht Englisch"/"The man _who
> I gave a hat to/to who(m) I gave a hat_ speaks English",
I don't think that's possible -- I think the construction you
mentioned only allows you to refer to the subject of the relative
clause, not an indirect object or similar.

When I try to make a preposed relative clause out of it, the closest I
get is "Der von mir einen Hut erhalten habende Mann spricht Englisch",
which is, of course, not the same in structure, since the main verb
changed from "give" to "receive".

> Well,  professional typesetter might be able to type a double-acute (as in
> Hungarian) over "a", but as Hungarian only uses them over "o" and "u" (as it
> lacks German and Finnish's a-umlaut), Unicode/HTML (possibly) and OpenOffice
> (definitely) lack "a-double-acute".
Unicode lets you produce an a-double-acute by using combining
diacritics: U+0061 U+030B. (Here's what it looks like for you:
...a̋...)

Whether that'll look acceptable depends on the fonts you have
available and on the rendering engine employed.

> (This may be going off-topic, but IMHO Unicode really should have included
> all possible combinations of letter+accent,
Eh?

As far as I know, Unicode's philosophy is not to encode combinations
of letter + diacritic (in general) unless such precomposed characters
already exist in legacy encodings, so your suggestion goes against the
underlying philosophy.

Not to mention that IMO your suggestion is completely unfeasible.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of "letters" in Unicode, and
dozens of combining diacritics in the U+03xx Combining Diacritical
Marks block alone. Now if you want to be able to apply more than one
diacritic to a letter, you'd have, say, 80! combinations of
diacritics, times thousands of base characters -- how many bits did
you want to use per character, again? (NB 80! is about 7x10^118, or on
the order of 2^395.)

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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