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Germanic Lexicon Project
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Author: Sean Crist (Swarthmore College)
Email: kurisuto at unagi dot cis dot upenn dot edu
Date: 2005-02-25 08:29:46
Subject: Re: &nbar;
> Sean, I've had some second thoughts about the -long and
> bar dilemma. Logically, I think that they are the same thing.
> For both, the "short horizontal line" is positioned right above
> the body of a letter, where in the case of a symbol with an ascender there
> is an intersection. So, if we allow a double name for each symbol,
> i.e. 
being called both a-long and abar, then, to me, there
> wouldn't be a problem.
Well, that's one way you could define it: "-bar" means a horizontal line at a fixed position regardless of the shape of the character. Whether it overstrikes depends on how tall the base character is.
At least in the case of the macron, Unicode hasn't taken that approach. Unicode decomposes &A-long; and as having the same diacritic, the macron diacritic (U0304); the macron is typeset above the character that it modifies and doesn't ever overstrike it, regardless of how tall the base character is. The macron always "floats" just above its base character.
The Unicode Standard specifically lists what we've been calling the "-bar" diacritic (U0336) in the section for overstruck diacritics. The little picture shows a bar struck across a half-tone circle (where the circle stands for any base character); the circle is the height of a lower-case "o". So I think it's clear that this diacritic is always supposed to be overstruck over some portion of the base character, even tho I can't say for sure how high it's supposed to be overstruck in the case of characters with ascenders.
U0336 doesn't appear to be an atom for any of the precomposed characters in Unicode, so we can't look at examples to see how it's supposed to behave with characters of different heights. In the character table, I'm currently listing 
and 
with this diacritic, but I'm not certain that this is correct, since the bar has to be typeset crossing the ascender of these characters and not, say, thru the lower circular portion of the "b". I probably should subscribe to the Unicode mailing list and ask this question; or, maybe someone else reading this board knows.
We can define our entities however we want; if we like, we can take the approach of saying that "-bar" means a horizontal bar with a fixed vertical position, which overstrikes tall characters but not short characters. We can do this, but it would mean that "-bar" maps to different Unicode diacritics depending on what the base character is. That can be done without any great difficulty, but so far, none of the entities takes this approach.
However, as long as we're not losing any contrasts between characters, I think that the overarching question is what is the easiest for the body of volunteers. If it's counterintuitive to think of this n-plus-macron character as being "long" (=geminate?), we can call it n-bar. I wouldn't worry about it too much, because it's obviously a very rare character in Bosworth/Toller; we've only seen this one token so far.
--Sean
| Messages in this thread | Name | College/University | Date |
| &nbar; |
Gene Brunner |
Penn State (retired) |
2005-02-21 03:16:23 |
| Re: &nbar; |
Sean Crist |
Swarthmore College |
2005-02-21 08:58:12 |
| Re: &nbar; |
Gene Brunner |
Penn State (retired) |
2005-02-21 13:00:58 |
| Re: &nbar; |
Gene Brunner |
Penn State (retired) |
2005-02-21 23:56:43 |
| Re: &nbar; |
Sean Crist |
Swarthmore College |
2005-02-25 08:29:46 |