¡uʍop ǝpısdn ǝʇıɹʍ uɐɔ ooʇ noʎ

On Fri, 5 Dec 2008 20:01:47 -0800, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:

>--- On Fri, 12/5/08, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
>
>> From: Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
>
>>
>> I wonder why it uses that instead of U+0253 LATIN SMALL
>> LETTER B WITH HOOK (É“)?
>
>Clearly Unicode needs to include upside down letters, mirror image letters,
and upside down mirror image letters.

Clearly they do.  Upside down letters at least.

I mean, didn't it always used to happen that you'd be out doing fieldwork,
on a mission, what have you, and you'd need some extra distinctive letters
you could produce with your trusty typewriter for some orthography you were
stirring up -- and what could you do?  Well, drawing things by hand is a
pain, and not neat; there's overstriking, but you're up the creek if you've
ever got to set overstruck characters in type; then there's using
upside-down letters.  And this was not an unpopular solution: the best
example coming to mind is the Fraser script for Lisu
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraser_alphabet
which gives the impression of upside-downing every capital that didn't get
out of the way fast enough.  So I'd not be surprised if there was precedent
for using every upside-down Roman letter for writing some language, somewhere.

And I thought a certain amount of this underlay the characters chosen in the
design of the IPA as well.  Its roster of (nontrivial) upside-downs is a
decently long one: [Q O @ J\ b_< H M r\ V W L] plus deprecated click symbols
if I've not made a mistake.

Alex

Replies