From: stephen@estragon.uchicago.edu (Stephen P Spackman)
Subject: Re: Latin alphabet (was: Inventing a writing system?)
Organization: University of Chicago CILS
	<8874@scott.ed.ac.uk> <1992Apr5.022737.9286@cs.yale.edu>
Date: Sun, 5 Apr 1992 10:19:14 GMT

In article <1992Apr5.022737.9286@cs.yale.edu> horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne) writes:
|I used to think so, too.  Then I met Unicode.  Try this on for size:
|Letters (with or without diacritical marks) found in European languages
|are "characters" deserving space in the character set, whereas letters
|(with or without diacritical marks) found in non-European languages may
|be considered "glyphs" or "glyphic variants" and as such excluded, left to
|the often not-so-thoughtful hands of software designers.  (The tone letters
|of the Chinese _bopomofo_ phonetic script are "glyphic variants" of the
|French accent marks, according to the top-level cadres over at Unicode.)
|What do you think?  (You still have the flame torch, you know.  :-))

I think you missed a large point. The word "glyph" (as I recall) is
used in Unicode jargon to refer to the visual presentation of the
symbol, and is distinguished in all cases from the "character" which
is the thing coded. So *all* symbols in the character set are
CHARACTERs, and the GLYPHS are the business of font designers. This is
a distinction that seems to have very little to do with geography (in
fact the remarkable thing about Unicode is how LITTLE regard it has
for geography, though it shows too much for recent history - in the
from of the contents and layout of the first 256 positions).

The notion of a "glyphic variant" is simply that two renditions of the
SAME character might differ. Consider my handwriting. Sometimes I use
a thorn, because they're pretty. That's a different CHARACTER from a t
or an h. I also sometimes write an s like a reversed c. That's a
glyphic variant, because the character is still "an s" even if it's
written funny. So it doesn't get a new character code, and if you WANT
your computer to simulate my handwriting, you write a programme to do
it - it's in the hands of the programmer. Is this so weird?

Now, cross-linguistic glyphic variants are an odd idea, but surely
it's better to assign all the little diagonal lines that sit above the
character and go up to the right to the same character code than to
have several of them and argue about how many? After all, the symbol a
ALSO has different phonetic values in different languages, and you
(in, dare I say it? your eurocentrism) are happy enough to class them
all together.

It's like phoneme definition. You want to say "non-contrastive" and be
done, but you need to avoid "heng". So you impose similarity
requirements (in this case visual ones) on co-classing....

So, to reiterate: Characters are the things that are assigned
character codes, and constitute the standard. Glyphs are the actual
images, are the business of the software and the typesetter, and are
not part of the standard at all. Glyphic variants are alternate forms
of glyphs that differ so little in form and meaning - like sans serif
letters or clef-shaped G's (to pick some fairly extreme european
examples) that they do not induce different abstract characters and
therefore don't get distinct points in the codespace.

The world's characters will fit without cramping into 16 bits. Why use
32? To show Chinese how liberal we are by giving them priveleges we
don't give ourselves, and burdening the future with more history? It's
not "us" and "them". You discriminate or you don't. Don't.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
stephen p spackman         Center for Information and Language Studies
stephen@estragon.uchicago.edu                    University of Chicago
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: sci.lang