AW: Eszett

[Eric Brunner-Williams]

John C Klensin wrote:
> --On Sunday, July 12, 2009 08:33 -0400 Eric Brunner-Williams
> <ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net> wrote:
>
>   
>> John C Klensin wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> ... we
>>> would ban "w" in favor of "uu" or "vv", might ban "u" in favor
>>> of "v" ...
>>>       
>> Clearly the correct form is a "u" positioned above, and
>> joining, an "o", the Wabenaki solution to the problem
>> presented by 16th century French lacking the requisite
>> character. If you'll all turn your Unicode hymn books to
>> U+0222 and U+0223 ...
>>     
>
> Of course, in their Unicode font rendering, someone would
> probably complain that both characters were confusable with the
> digit "8", but...
>   

In fact, the digit "8" was used in some Abenaki orthography, along with 
the "o" "u" vertical ligature, during the hayday of manual typewritters.

Back in the '03 work I discussed the Abenaki equivalence class of {8, 
w,  ou, and U+0222, U+0223}, in the context of local scope for zone file 
equivalence classes.

> There are moments (but only extremely brief moments) when I
> think that maybe we should have taken RFC 5242 more seriously :-(

It will never displace avian carrier. However, funny smiley face _off_, 
when I recommended to the then-chair of the IRTF circa 2002 (or earlier) 
that task E in rfc2130 be undertaken, the response I got was "no".

Eric