Re: Phonetics

On 3/29/07, John Vertical <johnvertical@...> wrote:
> Yes, independant of any particular realization (no specified line width
> etc.), but are you really claiming that it's independant of ANY realization?
The concept originated with a graphical realization, but yes, it
continues to exist even where there isn't one.  I can say that a text
file on disk contains an a-with-macron, without bothering to do
anything to render that character as a glyph.

The levels of abstraction are not always clearly differentiated, of
course.  Real life is never that easy. :)  A Latin textbook in Braille
is arguably chock full of a's-with-macrons that bear no resemblance to
the usual glyph; but if that book were represented in Unicode, it
would use the Unicode code points for the Braille dot patterns.  The
difference there arguably lies somewhere between "different glyphs for
the same character" and "different characters".



--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>