Re: Eng (was: Name mangling)

On Thursday, March 10, 2005 10:30 AM CET, Tristan McLeay wrote:

> On 10 Mar 2005, at 5.52 pm, Ray Brown wrote:
>
>> On Wednesday, March 9, 2005, at 07:07 , Andreas Johansson wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> Joe suggested eng, but, AFAIK, it doesn't have an uppercase form, and
>>> it'
>>> s
>>> riskier in electronic form than is ñ.
>>
>> Eng certainly has an upper case form. It's like the ordinary upper
>> case N
>> with the 'eng tail'. Eng is actually used in some natlang
>> orthographies.
>>
>> But you're sure right that it's riskier in electronic form than Ñ and
>> ñ.
>> Upper case eng is supposed to be Unicode Hex U+014A, namely Ŋ
>>
>> But my mailer displays it as a sort of lower case _h_, which is quite
>> wrong, and so do most of the many, many fonts on my machine; only Cardo
>> and Zapfino display it correctly.
>>
>> So if you want to see what the symbol really looks like, read my mail
>> in
>> Cardo or Zapfino  :)
>>
>> Personally, I find this state of affairs both frustrating and
>> inexcusable.
>
> Personally, I don't think it's fair to say that a particular glyph form
> is wrong, unless all the people who use the character dislike the form.
I agree completely. And there are many Unicode characters whose form varies
from language to language, such as some Devanagari ligatures which have
different forms according they're used in Hindi or in Sanskrit, the Cyrillic
small letter pe, which is italicized with completely different forms in
Russia and in Serbia (http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch02.pdf,
page 7, Figure 2-2) or many CJK unified ideographs.

> Capital Eng is not defined by any script which mandates particular
> glyph styles, unlike lowercase eng.
Here are some samples of the capital and small engs in various fonts:
http://users.skynet.be/fa597525/Eng.pdf.

> Even if it were, no-one thinks it's
> wrong that there's two possible glyphs for g, but the IPA says only one
> form is correct.
And that's why there's a separate g at U+0261 LATIN SMALL LETTER SCRIPT G
(which, BTW, is distinct from U+210A SCRIPT SMALL G).

> The enlarged eng form is commonly used, is not
> confuseable for some other symbol, and is clearly associated with the
> lowercase eng form (though the N-hook form is too, by virtue of its
> similarity to N~n).
>
> (FWIW, The font I'm using, which I think is Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
> (tho the Eng glyph might come from some other similar fixed-width font)
> uses a capital N-style Eng.)
Since I've reinstalled all my system a few days ago and I haven't changed
the default fonts yet, OE uses Times New Roman for CP-1252, Latin-1 and
Unicode text, and the capital eng (Ŋ), which I type with the keys
Shift-AltGr-N, appears like an enlarged small eng.


JF