> If I'm following you correctly, you are saying that some specialists argue that the distinction between cursive, blackletter etc. is the same as that between upper and lowercase?
No, that's not my position.
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> Fonts are not cases.
Those aren't fonts.
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> Different font/script families like cursive, blackletter, etc. all themselves include upper-case and lower-case variants
It's not clear to me why you felt the need to say this.
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> > it's letters that get a different letter-form because of rules about what's being written.
>
> This is an extremely abstract definition of case.
that is:
1. not a definition
2. not about case
3. not abstract
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> I also don't think see how it covers the different forms and combinations of letters in Perso-Arabic script, sine these are purely mechanical
Some are, some aren't. Sure, there are ligatures, but there are special forms for holy topics, and so forth.
Of course, I'm not talking about Perso-Arabic; I'm talking about Arabic. They're not exchangable that way.
Perso-Arabic is not how you describe that writing system, by the way. Perso-arabic is how you reference the specific branch of Arabic that's been bent to writing in Iran. It's meant to distinguish from Farsi, not to encompass Arabic as a whole.
Anyway, this shouldn't be surprising, since Arabic is an abjad, so it doesn't really handle this discussion, since it's got entire implicit letters.
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> I also don't necessarily agree that it covers the difference between blackletter and roman, since really this is more likely to be decided by who is doing the writing
My opinion is that you missed the purpose of my comment, which was not to talk about stylistic choices by authors.
Of course, as a user of the internet I am aware of things like fonts.
But since you're apparently a linguist, I'm sure that you're aware that in Europe, for about 400 years, the word "god" was written in what you appear to think is a different font, at a different size, in some countries even by law.
This is what I'm talking about. Not someone sitting in Word trying to make something look pretty; rather, language rules which a schoolteacher would use in grading something as correct or incorrect. Unicode doesn't encode stylistic choices, but it does encode language rules. If something is in Unicode, either it's an Emoji, or someone thought it was a valid part of language somewhere. Admittedly, that music is in there means the definition of language is being stretched a bit; still if it is in Unicode and isn't an emoji, it's because someone is trying to make a real world pre-existing rule usable.
It's got nothing to do with fonts, you'll find. There's a blackletter block in most fonts, and it looks different font to font.
I'll tie the knot.
There's an author of comedy - I think he might have recently passed on early alzheimer's - named Terry Pratchett. I always found his style to be similar to the better known Douglass Adams. His world theme was swords and sorcery rather than science fiction, but it's all about the wordplay and nonsense nonetheless.
Most of his books take place in a shared universe called "discworld," in which ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ gets her name written in small caps in every single book. (See how I did that? HN doesn't have fonts.)
Now, you might argue that that's a stylistic choice, and therefore doesn't qualify for discussion here. Indeed, if you did, I would even agree with you: that's my point, after all. I'd even skip the bitter argument about how smallcaps aren't small caps, because the letter width is different, the e and x heights are different, et cetera. Try to tell a typesetter "it's just a font" and you might get yelled at
I would say that the reason there's a meaningful difference is that no schoolteacher will ever mark your paper wrong due to not following Terry Pratchett's standards, where as schoolteachers *will* mark you wrong in Ecumenical School for not using blackletter when writing God.
Because there are rules. And even if you, apparently a linguist don't know about them, they're still there.
That is, of course, why Unicode has alternate letterforms, such as 𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱, 𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘤, 𝓉𝒽ℯ 𝒶𝒻ℴ𝓇ℯ𝓂ℯ𝓃𝓉𝒾ℴ𝓃ℯ𝒹 𝒸𝓊𝓇𝓈𝒾𝓋ℯ, 𝓲𝓽𝓼 𝓫𝓸𝓵𝓭, 𝕕𝕠𝕦𝕓𝕝𝕖-𝕤𝕥𝕣𝕦𝕔𝕜 𝕔𝕙𝕒𝕣𝕒𝕔𝕥𝕖𝕣𝕤 for math, 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖊𝖛𝖊𝖓 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖇𝖑𝖆𝖈𝖐𝖑𝖊𝖙𝖙𝖊𝖗 𝖙𝖍𝖆𝖙 𝖞𝖔𝖚'𝖗𝖊 𝖈𝖚𝖗𝖗𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖑𝖞 𝖆𝖗𝖌𝖚𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖆𝖇𝖔𝖚𝖙.
Because they're not fonts! They're meaningfully distinct letter forms with well understood usage patterns. (Blackletter shows up twice, with identical symbols, once for math and once for religion, and there's talk of adding a third for physics, because 𝕮, 𝕮, and 𝕮 all mean different things, and Unicode's position is that they should have different character representations for different meanings, despite having potentially identical graphic distinctions.
Indeed, if you ask a linguist "when is the most common use in English of double-struck letters," and they'll probably have a ready answer for you.
Heck, the Unicode formal character names have the answer baked right in pretty often.
U+1D539 U+0042 MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE‑STRUCK CAPITAL B Bopf
Not a font, friend. Not even if you really believe it is.
If you need clarity on the matter, use your own tool: you wanted to remind me that blackletter "wasn't uppercase" (nobody said it was) because it has upper case and lower case variants. Well, here's some of your own medicine. Fonts, like Arial and Times New Roman, have their own distinct blackletter and double-struck representations. And they look different, in the way that fonts do. Because they need to support the valid, different letterforms. A blackletter meant for Arial will look terrible set into Times, or vice versa.
There is an actual right and wrong here. This isn't an issue of opinion.
Of course, if you're a linguist, all I really need to do is say "swiss eszett."
At any rate, maybe all of my textbooks are wrong. No, I'm not interested in digging them out and looking them up for you, and it does not compel me that a stranger says they're wrong until I spend time finding it. If you're evidence motivated, bring some. If not, fine by me. Since you're a linguist, and I'm just a lowly programmer, if you actually want to check reference, go right ahead, be my guest; I'm sure you own much more of it than I do.
It's irrelevant to me: Unicode has rules, they cover this topic, they're clear on the point, they aren't set on website discussions, and if you want to debate them, we'll see you at the next meeting.
Good luck. There's an awful lot of inertia behind how it's currently seen, and it's extensively supported by the literature in the free, publicly available unicode meeting minutes.
Thank you for typing all of that out. First of all, I should like to apologize for the tone in my last post.
It seems quite strange to me to say that blackletter is not a font/typeface/script (or a clade of such objects). Historically, before we have mixed usage of the scripts, they absolutely were different typefaces, and the distinction between who used blackletter and who used roman was obviously one of time and place. The two are closely related, like dialects, but they are distinct.
Now, mixing scripts is also common as you mention, as has the recruitment of single symbols like the use of blackletter in mathematics. But, I mean, Hebrew letters have also been used. Does that make them part of our script in any sense?
As I hinted at I have some knowledge of some languages of the Islamic world, and as you know the inclusion of Arabic words and phrases, written in the Arabic script, is very common in texts written in non-Arabic languages. It is similar to how Western philosophers routinely write Greek words without transliteration to look smart. As humans, we have no problem switching between different scripts and languages that we have knowledge of. Now, computers do have such problems, hence Unicode to capture all of it instead of the mess that came before. But they're still distinct scripts.
Now, contrast that with case. The concept of case is at the very core of the modern Latin alphabet in all its derivations. The history of it is completely different to the distinction between roman and blackletter. The alternation between uppercase and lowercase is not something that occurs only in specialist contexts, nor is it analogous to mathematicians running out of symbols and recruiting new ones from different scripts. I'm simply saying that 'A' and 'a' have a relationship that's similar to the one between their blackletter counterparts, but the relationship between those two sets is very different. And I don't think inventing a category like "letters that get a different letter-form because of rules about what's being written" is very helpful, except maybe outside of the very specific technical context of solving the problem Unicode is solving.
(By the way, you make it sound like you are part of the Unicode process? If so, thank you very much for your service.)
> First of all, I should like to apologize for the tone in my last post.
Color me surprised. Thank you for saying so.
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> It seems quite strange to me to say that blackletter is not a font/typeface/script (or a clade of such objects). Historically, before we have mixed usage of the scripts, they absolutely were different typefaces, and the distinction between who used blackletter and who used roman was obviously one of time and place. The two are closely related, like dialects, but they are distinct.
I don't mean to seem rude, but it's not at all clear to me how you can believe this.
Typefaces begin with the invention of movable type, which depending on what you count as "enough" is probably Bi Sheng. However since the context is blackletter and international trade hadn't emerged yet, we're stuck with Laurens Janszoon Coster in context. His work is generally believed to have been around 1420, though records aren't terribly clear. (Any number involving 420 is pretty good though, so just run with it.)
Prior to this, in European context, there is no such thing as a typeface.
The emergence of blackletter is contentious - it's not clear whether to include gothic miniscule (or, at the other end, textura) - but my preference is for the standard issue of 1150, about 300 years before type existed.
Blackletter is so old that its nearest unambiguous parent is Carolingian.
Blackletter is older than fully 70% of yo momma jokes, both in content and target.
Amusingly, it is actually well known and well documented that the first typeset Gutenberg used was blackletter. This seems invalidating to me.
> the distinction between who used blackletter and who used roman was obviously one of time and place
My problem with the word "obviously" is that in my personal experience, it has been more often used about things that are incorrect than things that are correct.
Blackletter has been pretty squarely relegated to The Bible, in truth. Its emergent use in mathematics is recent, and the result of our running out of several other groups of symbols to use - they had already run through latin, cyrillic, latin, greek, doublestruck, bold, italics, capital variants of all the preceding, and a variety of related symbols.
Kanzlei, the ancestor of the font, was developed by monks for the specific purpose of producing visually pleasing, salable bibles. As this preceded movable type, Bibles, which were very long, were intensely expensive - sometimes a full year of a person's income. This is also why they were so ornately decorated.
Frankly, it's an awful font, and should never be used for anything. Not even wedding invitations. And for once, all of humanity (you know, the same humanity that still uses comic sans) just stayed away, probably because of the intense eye pain.
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> But, I mean, Hebrew letters have also been used. Does that make them part of our script in any sense?
No. It makes them a part of mathematics, which is not a part of "our" script either.
As far as I know, this starts and stops with aleph. Aleph in hebrew is U+05D0. Aleph in mathematics is U+2135.
Are there any other Hebrew letters in use by math at all?
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> as you know the inclusion of Arabic words and phrases, written in the Arabic script, is very common in texts written in non-Arabic languages
Transclusion of foreign segments is formally irrelevant to the nature of native orthographies.
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> But they're still distinct scripts.
Unicode has a vast and unweildly array of counterexamples in its documentation, some of which were already linked for you, but I'm glad that you're confident.
Again: swiss eszett.
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> Now, contrast that with case. The concept of case is at the very core of the modern Latin alphabet in all its derivations.
This is, of course, 100% incorrect. The Latin alphabet was 100% what we would call uppercase until around 200 ad, and miniscule didn't normalize across the language for another 300 years.
Latin spend more time monocameral than bicameral by more than triple. We currently think of Latin as emerging in 700 BC, and we typically think of the death of Latin as the second fall of Rome in 476 AD.
So in reality, Latin was single case for 900 years and double case for less than 300.
I strongly recommend you start verifying your beliefs before presenting them as fact. You're batting 1 for 19 at the time of this writing.
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> The history of it is completely different to the distinction between roman and blackletter.
The academics do not agree.
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> The alternation between uppercase and lowercase is not something that occurs only in specialist contexts
I never said it was, and this is not the case of most of my examples.
I feel that you are arguing for the sake of arguing, and have lost track of my intent for the hope of going for each sentence out of context.
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> nor is it analogous to mathematicians running out of symbols and recruiting new ones from different scripts.
Cool, didn't say this was either.
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> I'm simply saying that 'A' and 'a' have a relationship that's similar to the one between their blackletter counterparts
Say that as many times as you like. The historians and linguists don't agree, even though you have a belief system to display.
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> And I don't think inventing a category like "letters that get a different letter-form because of rules about what's being written" is very helpful
That's nice. I didn't invent that. I'd tell you to talk to the person who did, but he's been dead for more than a thousand years.
Kinda spooky.
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> except maybe outside of the very specific technical context of solving the problem Unicode is solving.
"Except outside of the very specific technical context of the exact thing this post and you were talking about, and has been the core of your point the whole time."
Thanks, I guess.
I'd respond, but I think this isn't very helpful, except maybe outside of the outside of the very specific technical context of human language as it's used on Earth
Imagine trying to argue what things actually count as letters, then begging out "you're being too technical"
You are right, I maybe have lost track of what we're talking about, or maybe I am reading too quickly - a bit like I think you are when you take my reference to "the modern Latin alphabet and all its derivatives" to be about antiquity.
So let us backtrack. I am still reacting to your original point, which was that English has blackletter and cursive as "alternate cases". I understood that to mean that if we take the idea of the letter A (the thing that the uppercase and lowercase A have in common), that the cursive and blackletter realizations of it somehow enter into the same paradigm as the two roman glyphs do in English. I really don't see how you could argue that that is the case.
> I don't mean to seem rude, but it's not at all clear to me how you can believe this.
I can believe it because blackletter typefaces were the dominant in my country for all purposes into the early modern era, when they were supplanted by roman ones. I think this is at least partially related to the unification of Germany and our losing a war against them.
No, that's not my position.
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> Fonts are not cases.
Those aren't fonts.
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> Different font/script families like cursive, blackletter, etc. all themselves include upper-case and lower-case variants
It's not clear to me why you felt the need to say this.
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> > it's letters that get a different letter-form because of rules about what's being written. > > This is an extremely abstract definition of case.
that is:
1. not a definition
2. not about case
3. not abstract
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> I also don't think see how it covers the different forms and combinations of letters in Perso-Arabic script, sine these are purely mechanical
Some are, some aren't. Sure, there are ligatures, but there are special forms for holy topics, and so forth.
Of course, I'm not talking about Perso-Arabic; I'm talking about Arabic. They're not exchangable that way.
Perso-Arabic is not how you describe that writing system, by the way. Perso-arabic is how you reference the specific branch of Arabic that's been bent to writing in Iran. It's meant to distinguish from Farsi, not to encompass Arabic as a whole.
Anyway, this shouldn't be surprising, since Arabic is an abjad, so it doesn't really handle this discussion, since it's got entire implicit letters.
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> I also don't necessarily agree that it covers the difference between blackletter and roman, since really this is more likely to be decided by who is doing the writing
My opinion is that you missed the purpose of my comment, which was not to talk about stylistic choices by authors.
Of course, as a user of the internet I am aware of things like fonts.
But since you're apparently a linguist, I'm sure that you're aware that in Europe, for about 400 years, the word "god" was written in what you appear to think is a different font, at a different size, in some countries even by law.
This is what I'm talking about. Not someone sitting in Word trying to make something look pretty; rather, language rules which a schoolteacher would use in grading something as correct or incorrect. Unicode doesn't encode stylistic choices, but it does encode language rules. If something is in Unicode, either it's an Emoji, or someone thought it was a valid part of language somewhere. Admittedly, that music is in there means the definition of language is being stretched a bit; still if it is in Unicode and isn't an emoji, it's because someone is trying to make a real world pre-existing rule usable.
It's got nothing to do with fonts, you'll find. There's a blackletter block in most fonts, and it looks different font to font.
I'll tie the knot.
There's an author of comedy - I think he might have recently passed on early alzheimer's - named Terry Pratchett. I always found his style to be similar to the better known Douglass Adams. His world theme was swords and sorcery rather than science fiction, but it's all about the wordplay and nonsense nonetheless.
Most of his books take place in a shared universe called "discworld," in which ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ gets her name written in small caps in every single book. (See how I did that? HN doesn't have fonts.)
Now, you might argue that that's a stylistic choice, and therefore doesn't qualify for discussion here. Indeed, if you did, I would even agree with you: that's my point, after all. I'd even skip the bitter argument about how smallcaps aren't small caps, because the letter width is different, the e and x heights are different, et cetera. Try to tell a typesetter "it's just a font" and you might get yelled at
I would say that the reason there's a meaningful difference is that no schoolteacher will ever mark your paper wrong due to not following Terry Pratchett's standards, where as schoolteachers *will* mark you wrong in Ecumenical School for not using blackletter when writing God.
Because there are rules. And even if you, apparently a linguist don't know about them, they're still there.
That is, of course, why Unicode has alternate letterforms, such as 𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱, 𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘤, 𝓉𝒽ℯ 𝒶𝒻ℴ𝓇ℯ𝓂ℯ𝓃𝓉𝒾ℴ𝓃ℯ𝒹 𝒸𝓊𝓇𝓈𝒾𝓋ℯ, 𝓲𝓽𝓼 𝓫𝓸𝓵𝓭, 𝕕𝕠𝕦𝕓𝕝𝕖-𝕤𝕥𝕣𝕦𝕔𝕜 𝕔𝕙𝕒𝕣𝕒𝕔𝕥𝕖𝕣𝕤 for math, 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖊𝖛𝖊𝖓 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖇𝖑𝖆𝖈𝖐𝖑𝖊𝖙𝖙𝖊𝖗 𝖙𝖍𝖆𝖙 𝖞𝖔𝖚'𝖗𝖊 𝖈𝖚𝖗𝖗𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖑𝖞 𝖆𝖗𝖌𝖚𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖆𝖇𝖔𝖚𝖙.
Because they're not fonts! They're meaningfully distinct letter forms with well understood usage patterns. (Blackletter shows up twice, with identical symbols, once for math and once for religion, and there's talk of adding a third for physics, because 𝕮, 𝕮, and 𝕮 all mean different things, and Unicode's position is that they should have different character representations for different meanings, despite having potentially identical graphic distinctions.
Indeed, if you ask a linguist "when is the most common use in English of double-struck letters," and they'll probably have a ready answer for you.
Heck, the Unicode formal character names have the answer baked right in pretty often.
U+1D539 U+0042 MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE‑STRUCK CAPITAL B Bopf
Not a font, friend. Not even if you really believe it is.
If you need clarity on the matter, use your own tool: you wanted to remind me that blackletter "wasn't uppercase" (nobody said it was) because it has upper case and lower case variants. Well, here's some of your own medicine. Fonts, like Arial and Times New Roman, have their own distinct blackletter and double-struck representations. And they look different, in the way that fonts do. Because they need to support the valid, different letterforms. A blackletter meant for Arial will look terrible set into Times, or vice versa.
There is an actual right and wrong here. This isn't an issue of opinion.
Of course, if you're a linguist, all I really need to do is say "swiss eszett."
At any rate, maybe all of my textbooks are wrong. No, I'm not interested in digging them out and looking them up for you, and it does not compel me that a stranger says they're wrong until I spend time finding it. If you're evidence motivated, bring some. If not, fine by me. Since you're a linguist, and I'm just a lowly programmer, if you actually want to check reference, go right ahead, be my guest; I'm sure you own much more of it than I do.
It's irrelevant to me: Unicode has rules, they cover this topic, they're clear on the point, they aren't set on website discussions, and if you want to debate them, we'll see you at the next meeting.
Good luck. There's an awful lot of inertia behind how it's currently seen, and it's extensively supported by the literature in the free, publicly available unicode meeting minutes.