Re: Eng (was: Name mangling)

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.
Capital Eng is not defined by any script which mandates particular
glyph styles, unlike lowercase eng. 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. 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.)


--
Tristan.

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