[XeTeX] Hyphenation in polyglossia - Latin and Greek

[Yannis Haralambous]

Le 16 mai 09 à 17:56, John Was a écrit :

> The polytonic system looks nice (and I'm the last one to want to see  
> it disappear) but is strictly over-elaborate in modern Greek since  
> the standard language no longer uses varieties of tonic accent - so  
> one accent would in fact do the job (native Greek speakers don't  
> need it at all really, since they all know where the accent comes  
> anyway!).


This is the typical false argument number 1 of the monotonists:

it is false because it assumes that writing has the only function of  
representing oral language, and so whatever has no oral function is  
useless. This is clearly wrong otherwise we would all write in the  
phonetic alphabet. Accents carry morphological and syntactic  
information, breathings etymological one, just like iotacism,  
diphthongs, etc. Of course once and then somebody arrives and says "we  
don't the iota/eta/upsilon distinction, nor the omicron/omega one",  
but then of course people get upset. People do not realize that  
accents and breathing are first-class citizens of the writing system,  
just like letters.