Re: Eng (was: Name mangling)

Darn Gmail! this got sent to Philip instead of the list - sorry Philip!

Oh well - I'll try again   :)

On Thursday, March 10, 2005, at 08:35 , Philip Newton wrote:

> On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 06:52:52 +0000, Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
> wrote:
[snip]
>> 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  :)
>
> I saw it like this:
> http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v405/pne/uppercase-eng.png . I don't
> know which font my mailer chose; the body of the mail was Arial,
> however.
>
> It doesn't look like the Unicode reference glyph (capital N with eng
> tail), but not like a lower-case h, either -- more like an incomplete
> capital D or, well, a capital version of lower-case eng (but with no
The 'incomplete D' version is the one I have since discovered was used by
in the 'African Alphabet' published by the International Institute of
Languages & Culture in London in 1930. I believe they called the letter
'ing'.

It may be the way Arial & these other fonts map out on a Mac - but most of
them produce, as I said, something more closely resembling lower case _h_
than anything else. I could find only Cardo & Zapfino giving a symbol I
would recognize as an uppercase eng.
===============================================

On Thursday, March 10, 2005, at 09:30 , Tristan McLeay wrote:

> On 10 Mar 2005, at 5.52 pm, Ray Brown wrote:
[snip]
>> 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.
It ain't a question of like and dislike - it's a question of _usage_.

> Capital Eng is not defined by any script which mandates particular
> glyph styles, unlike lowercase eng.
The 'African Alphabet' gave the 'incomplete D' version - if that is what
you mean by "mandated". Apparently the natlang orthographies that do use
eng, do in fact have 'preferred' uppercase form.

> 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.
Yeah, yeah - and IPA uses _both_ of the two possible lower case glyphs for
_a_ as *separate* symbols. So what? I do not see how IPA is relevant to
the discussion.

>  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).
The 'enlarged eng' or 'incomplete D' form has been in use for at least
three quarters of a century (see above) and IIRC the 'uppercase N with bow'
  has been around since the earlier years of the last century also. These
are established, I would have thought, by usage.

If you read my mail properly, you will see that - tho originally I had
forgotten (senior moment) the 'incomplete D' version - what I was
complaining about is a form that resembles *lower case h*, i.e. it has an
*ascender*.  No other uppercase letter has an ascender.

I was complaining about this form, _not_ because I dislike it (which is
irrelevant), but because:
- there are already two other forms, with at least three quarters of a
century of tradition behind them: we do not need a _third_ variant;
- it has an ascender and does not give the appearance of an uppercase
letter.
- it is actually _smaller_ than the lowercase letter and appears written
superscript.
================================================

On Thursday, March 10, 2005, at 01:47 , Jean-François Colson wrote:

[snip]
> 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.
You mean like the way that Sami has the 'uppercase N with tail' form &
Hausa had 'incomplete uppercase D' forms for uppercase eng?

So what? Neither are like a lower case _h_.

[snip]

>> 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).
Absolutely correct. So would it not be sensible in exactly the same way to
allow for the two different well-esablished traditions for uppercase eng?

[snip]
> 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.
Nah - it appears on my mailer as a superscript lowercase _h_. That is the
glyph I was and am complaining about.

IMO it ought to be possible in this day and age to print Sami with its
preferred uppercase eng & Hausa with its preferred form in any of the
standard fonts, and not be forced to have to read something that looks to
all the world like a superscript lowercase h.

In any event, there can be no doubt that at present it is still riskier,
as Steg wrote, to use uppercase eng (u+014A), than to use Ñ (u+00D1
&Ntilde) if you want any consistency in what others are likely to read.

Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
===============================================
Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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