Peter T. Rourke is of course entirely right in saying that the
different combinations of a vowel with accents and brreathing marks
represent different characters. But my hunch is that in the practical
world of looking up this or that these differences are for the most
part useless. Elli Mylonas' old Pandora search engine started the
practice of supporting searches that let you ignore accidentals.
"Stripped beta" searching turned out to be a very effective way of
formulating searches: in the overwhelming number of cases, the
overhead of getting the accents right isn't worth the results.
So for my work the decision to go with UTF-8 or stay with betacode
has been driven by the question: "which supports easier searching?".
If you work from a standard keyboard, in stripped beta you have to
learn that six characters have different meanings:
c=xi
h=eta
q=theta
x-chi
y=psi
w=omega
If you learn Greek and know nothing about betacode, "stripped UTF-8"
searching requires you to know that five characters on the modern
Greek keyboard behave differently from the standard English keyboard:
h=eta
u=theta
j=xi
c=psi
v=omega
For search purposes, a programmer can set those keys at the input
line so the user doesn't even have to switch keyboards.
I made the decision to move from Unicode when I could see that on a
Windows and Mac keyboard Greek search input in Unicode could be made
as simple as stripped beta. That's a very primitive perspective, but
I daresay that it covers 95% or more of actual use of 95% or more of
the texts that are read most of the time.
On Aug 28, 2005, at 4:21, James Cummings wrote:
> Patrick T. Rourke wrote:
>
>> Alpha acute is a different character from alpha grave, because it
>> has a different semantic meaning (the tone is different, not
>> simply the position as is the case with e.g. sigma terminal), it
>> is not merely a different glyph.
>>
>
> <snip/>
>
> > Some of the "characters"
>
>> are markup and should not be assigned Unicode code points. Some
>> have semantic differences from existing characters which the
>> Unicode Consortium (rightly or wrongly) considers insignificant
>> (take e.g. the acrophonic numerals with the same letterforms as
>> letters: is it really fair to expect those to be encoded
>> differently when the original users may have considered them to
>> be the same characters?). Some are very rare characters which may
>> be variants of existing characters and would be best represented
>> with the existing character and distinguishing markup. And some
>> are idiosyncratic characters which perhaps should not be encoded
>> at all.
>>
>
> I'd only disagree with your last statement, surely it is the
> idiosyncratic characters which are most in need of markup?
>
> Those interested in the markup of characters and XML maybe be
> interested in the significantly revised draft chapters on
> 'Languages and Character Sets' http://www.tei-c.org/P5/Guidelines/
> CH.html and 'Representation of non-standard characters and glyphs'
> http://www.tei-c.org/P5/Guidelines/WD.html being prepared for our
> next release of the TEI guidelines. If these don't allow you to do
> what you need generally, especially in representing betacode in a
> combination of markup and Unicode, then I'd strongly suggest
> raising it on TEI-L or submitting a 'feature request' on the
> sourceforge site. (tei.sourceforge.net) I only mention it because
> there have been a significant number of changes in this area from
> the P4 version of the guidelines.
>
> -James
> ---
> Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford
>
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