[luatex] hyphenating ancient Greek

[Joel C. Salomon]

On 06/12/2010 05:20 PM, Robin Fairbairns wrote:
> Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:
>> It would be much more convenient if case folding wouldn't depend on
>> the language, i.e. the Turkish "i" had a separate code point.
> 
> interesting the difference in attitude as between different languages.
> for example, the glyph capital A appears in english, greek and russian
> -- three different alphabets --- with the same sound (to first order).
> 
> yet a significantly different pair of glyphs (i in english and turkish)
> apparently occupy the same code point.

Well, there are three different alphabets at play here: Latin, Greek,
and Cyrillic.  For all that Turkish is using rules unlike most
Latin-alphabet languages, it is still using the Latin letters.

It might have been useful to encode a new letter that looks like ‘i’
whose uppercasing is ‘İ’ and a clone of ‘I’ whose lowercase is ‘ı’, but
preexisting Turkish texts use ASCII ‘i’ and ‘I’ and Unicode was
constrained to backward-compatibility in these cases.

(Creating a new character is no panacea; consider:  What is the
uppercasing of ‘ß’?  If you’re uppercasing the word “weiße”, you should
get “WEISSE”, i.e., ‘ß’→‘SS’ (but not the reverse: ‘ss’←‘SS’); if it’s
the _name_ “Weiße” you’re uppercasing, you should get “WEIẞE”, i.e.,
‘ß’↔‘ẞ’.  Would you care to tell Germans that the Eszett/“sharp s” used
in names is a different letter from the one used in common words?)

—Joel