Subject: Re: bug#36717: 25.3; greek.el: deprecated vowel+oxia combinations should be replaced with vowel+tonos counterparts

From: "Basil L. Contovounesios" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2019 21:52:19 +0100

Robert Alessi <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Thu, Jul 18, 2019 at 07:19:04PM +0100, Basil L. Contovounesios wrote:
>> Robert Alessi <[email-masked]> writes:
>> > Very well spotted.  Actually, the latter is the right one—that is:
>> > Greek Tonos, U+0384—while the former, Greek Oxia (U+1FFD) belongs to
>> > the group that was deprecated.  So it is the other way round: keep the
>> > former, and make the latter go.
>> 
>> AFAICT the link you provided does not say anything about oxia the
>> standalone character.
>
> You are perfectly right.  If it were up to me I would recommend to
> keep all those characters that were considered as duplicates.  I quote
> here from this page[^1]:
>
>      A false distinction was introduced to Unicode between the oxia
>      (acute) and tonos, resulting in wrongly duplicated code
>      points. See Greek Unicode duplicated vowels for a full
>      discussion.
>
> So strictly speaking, oxia alone is not yet removed from Unicode.

[Are characters ever removed from Unicode?]

> But as alpha, epsilon, eta, iota, omicron upsilon omega with oxia were
> allegedly deprecated *and removed* from the Greek extended range, I
> would say that oxia alone does not have much to live.

Without being a Unicode expert, I doubt these vowel compositions or the
oxia itself are going anywhere.  The only question is whether it is safe
and/or encouraged to replace oxia with tonos in all contexts, regardless
of whether classical or modern, and how Quail might do this.  At least,
that's what I'm wondering.

> [^1]: https://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Unicode_for_ancient_languages
>> 
>> I'm still interested in seeing some documentation on this deprecation
>> that is not from digitalclassicist.org.
>
> That, according to digitalclassicist.org, of course.  I will try to
> see if I find anything of relevance on unicode.org and report back.

Thanks for looking into this!

-- 
Basil