Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

U+1E23 : LATIN SMALL LETTER H WITH DOT ABOVE (ḣ) should have the dot in a different place #30

Closed
schuelermine opened this issue Dec 20, 2020 · 5 comments

Comments

@schuelermine
Copy link

schuelermine commented Dec 20, 2020

Defect Report

Title

U+1E23 : LATIN SMALL LETTER H WITH DOT ABOVE (ḣ) should have the dot in a different place

Font

NotoSerif-Regular.ttf

Where the font came from, and when

Preinstalled on Pop!_OS 20.10

Font Version

2.002

OS name and version

Pop!_OS 20.10

Issue

The dot on U+1E23 : LATIN SMALL LETTER H WITH DOT ABOVE (ḣ) should either be above the H's ascender (see fig. 1) or integrated next to it as is the case with U+1E03 : LATIN SMALL LETTER B WITH DOT ABOVE (ḃ) (see fig. 2)

Character data

U+1E23

Screenshot

Fig. 1: U+1E23 in the fonts Ubuntu and Cascadia Code
Fig. 1: U+1E23 in the fonts Ubuntu and Cascadia Code

Fig. 2: U+1E03 in Noto Serif
Fig. 2: U+1E03 in Noto Serif

@simoncozens simoncozens transferred this issue from notofonts/noto-fonts Jun 20, 2022
@simoncozens
Copy link
Contributor

I'm not convinced by this. Most fonts I can find have it centered and above, similar to what we do in Noto Serif. This includes some fonts that I really value for their scholarship - if I was going to be transliterating Hebrew (which is what I think ḣ is used for), I would reach for either the Brill typeface or Gentium, both of which do what we do.

(In other words, the problem might be that Noto Sans has the dot in the wrong place...)

It may be that there is not necessarily a "right" answer here.

@tiroj
Copy link

tiroj commented Mar 21, 2023

There isn’t a right answer: there is too much variety in dot mark positioning in writing systems and scholarly transcription systems. Dots are used for lot of different purposes: not only to transcribe phonemes but also as textual marks to indicate e.g. unclear readings or damaged letters in inscriptions. Some positioning is specific to individual letters for particular languages, e.g. that Gaelic b with a nested dot, while other positioning is general and systematic. So, for example, the handling of dots on Greek letters in the Brill fonts is different from that on Latin letters, because Brill’s primary use of dots in Greek scholarship is textual rather than linguistic.

@simoncozens
Copy link
Contributor

Thank you. I think I'm going to close this, then. It doesn't even sound like it's particularly important that things are consistent between families. (And no I won't do a stylistic set but someone else can send me a PR if they really want it.)

My dream is that one day there will be a database which links Unicode codepoints (particularly for those early-encoded ones for which there was no formal proposal) with their uses and some examples, which would help with this kind of decision. It took me long enough to find out that ḣ was used in Hebrew transcription, and even longer to find out that there weren't any specific expectations of how that ought to look.

@simoncozens simoncozens closed this as not planned Won't fix, can't repro, duplicate, stale Mar 21, 2023
@tiroj
Copy link

tiroj commented Mar 21, 2023

That was the idea behind ScriptSource but it seems mostly stalled. It is something that needs to be a full-time job for at least one person.

@moyogo always seems to have the most extensive information of this kind.

@moyogo
Copy link
Contributor

moyogo commented Mar 21, 2023

Having a nested dot on b is a requirement of Gaelic script, it is not a requirement of Latin script otherwise where its position is arbitary, each designer or user can have a different preference.

Since ḃ, ḋ, ḣ, k̇ are used in ISO 259 and ISO 259-2 for Hebrew romanization, it would better for them to have the same dot positioning in that context. Those ISO documents have centered dots but that may not be normative.

There is no doubt some users will complain if the dots of ḃ, ḋ are moved, and some other users will complain if the dots on ḣ, k̇ are moved.

The ḋ and ḣ are used in Harari Latin alphabet, @andjc’s Harari Harfi (2011) used centered dots.
The ḋ is also used in Galela orthography, typically with a nested dot in SIL documents.
But that’s based on a very small sample of typefaces used in those documents.

Personally, I’d center the dot above the letter like I’d center other top diacritics.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

5 participants