Re: Grammar

[John Haltiwanger <john.haltiwanger@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 1:31 PM, Arthur Reutenauer
<arthur.reutenauer@normalesup.org> wrote:
>> I for one have always thought it would be interesting to develop a
>> Unicode character that provides a symbol representing a neutral gender
>> pronoun.
>
>  Unicode encodes scripts, not languages, so that's outside of its
> scope.  Even if you were to develop a new character that would function
> as a neutral gender pronoun in English or other languages, it would
> still be attached to one (or several) language(s).  You're of course
> free to advocate its use in all existing languages with a written
> standard, but that would take some time ;-)  And even then, it would
> leave out the vast majority of languages, those that are only spoken.

I don't see how this applies: there are plenty of characters provided
by Unicode that can be used regardless of which language I am writing
in.. such as the male/female symbols already mentioned. So in this
case, it would be a symbol for the 'language of the internet', not
simply for a single language. Some symbols are available regardless of
the general language used, correct?

Granted, I know next to nothing about font encodings, so I'll defer
here to the knowledge of others.
___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage  : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net
archive  : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/
wiki     : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________