Talk:Unicase

lundi

French "lundi" is an unfortunate example: the first letter looks just like a capital i. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.167.54.37 (talk) 18:26, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

done. Torzsmokus (talk) 11:12, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Japanese

The Japanese does not have uppercase/lowercase but it does have hiragana/katakana alphabets, which are the same letters/sounds with different writing. They are not used in the same way as uppercase/lowercase is used, however this is a possible similarity. --zzo38(✉) 20:11, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

Capitalizing the first letter of a sentence

The rule that the first letter of a sentence should be capitalized is maybe common for quite a few languages, but certainly there are exceptions. 88.238.126.54 (talk) 16:52, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

True. Ancient Greek, for one, as printed in modern texts. Here's an example. Thnidu (talk) 06:10, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

Contradiction

The unsourced "belief" in paragraph two is immediately contradicted by the statement about the Georgian alphabet.

It is believed that all alphabets with case were once unicase . ...

The Georgian alphabet, in contrast, went the other way: the medieval Georgian alphabet with its two cases gave in to a unicase set.

Thnidu (talk) 06:15, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

I assume what it tries to say is that the originally unicameral script developed into a bicameral script in the Middle Ages but has since returned to a unicase system. I have now tried to clarify this. – Simo Kaupinmäki (talk) 10:48, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

I would like you to correct the last sentence: some African languages use officially the I.P.A. They're not the official languages of their states, but they write and print using only IPA. I have seen some magazines, for instance translations of WATCHTOWER and WAKE UP! into some languages of Ghana, printed in IPA. Michele Lazzari (talk) 08:24, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

Both alphabets and syllabaries can be bicameral

The article refers only to alphabets, yet a syllabary can also be bicameral. One such examples is the Cherokee syllabary which became a bicameral script on June 17, 2015, with the release of Unicode version 8.0 DFH (talk) 19:28, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

"Lowercase" in a unicase language...?

The article says, ...and palawa kani (lowercase) of Tasmania in Australia.

Er, no. You CAN'T have a lowercase without an uppercase, (or vice-versa) -- "uppercase" and "lowercase" are opposites, and are therefore a pair. You can't have one without the other.

Besides, if palawa kani is unicase, how can you say it is lowercase? By definition, unicase means "only one case," correct? How then could it be either lowercase OR uppercase?

And if you must insist on calling it one or the other, then why lowercase? Wouldn't calling it "uppercase" be just as valid (or just as invalid)...? — Preceding unsigned comment added by TheGrandRascal (talk • contribs) 11:12, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

I think what was probably intended was a unicase alphabet, based on Roman lowercase. Nuttyskin (talk) 12:47, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

Web typography

I'm moving here a section from the article:

==Web typography==

A unicase presentation can be specified in the CSS using font-variant: unicase;. For example, the HTML

<span style="font-variant: unicase;">Wikipedia</span>

<span style="font-variant: unicase;">AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz</span>

renders as

Wikipedia

AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz.

Since the CSS styles the text, and no actual case transformation is applied, readers are still able to copy the normally-capitalized plain text from the web page as rendered by a browser.

because it is uncited and I dispute it. On my browser (fairly recent firefox), the "renders as" appear exactly as typed in the example source, not in unicase. And the Mozilla CSS specs do not seem to have this specific syntax according to the "font-variant" property or the "unicase" value. DMacks (talk) 17:52, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

This is certainly an issue with the "living standard" web of late—which even moreseo means I certainly should have provided a citation when I added it, my apologies.

That said, I suppose I am confused by your confusion: the unicase value is listed on the second page, and the former page indicates that values for font-variant-caps property are freely usable in the (technically a shorthand, i think?) font-variant property, if I'm identifying the issue correctly. It is WP:SYNTH, so I could've been more precise. Remsense聊 18:00, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

I was actually pretty confused by the specs. I could not understand what was a synonym vs a subtype that could be specified directly. But given "it didn't work", then something is wrong. DMacks (talk) 19:43, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Unfortunately for our purposes, the way web standards work now is, well, a bit non-standard if you squint. The major web vendors have agreed to vest in a consortium that publishes "living standards" for HTML etc., and in this case CSS—here's the relevant mention in the current CSS standard. I didn't realize implementation of this specific point was so uneven—it's the way things are officially done now that vendors implement the standard in a rolling release manner, so I shouldn't have assumed the presentation would be evident for the reader. Remsense聊 19:49, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Here, how's this—much less misleading:

---

Unicase has been specified as a display variant in the CSS standard. For example, one can use the the font-variant: unicase property to render text as unicase in supported browsers. Since only the presentation of the text is styled, no actual case transformation is applied and readers are still able to copy the original plain text from the webpage.

---

Remsense聊 20:57, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

That sounds great. I don't even object to an example usage, as long as it actually looks the way it should look (per spec). So we could use <Smallcaps>...</Smallcaps> or whatever to force the desired display on a larger set of browsers, and maybe noting that it is not universally supported. DMacks (talk) 23:02, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

I think I would rather pop in an SVG displaying how it should render, because it's actually somewhat ambiguous what 'unicase' even means visually, plus it not being universally supported. Remsense聊 23:06, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Sure. DMacks (talk) 23:37, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

It's not merely "somewhat ambiguous" what 'unicase' means, it is a confused category error. "unicase" is said to mean, of a written language, that it has only one 'case' (where 'case' is undefined*). English (Roman letters) is not 'unicase', therefore to display it "in unicase" means to display it as though FALSE=TRUE. This is confused, amateur rambling, and does not, I think, belong in anything claiming to be an encyclopedia. (* Of course "case" is defined for Roman and Cyrillic; but not generally, cf Japanese.) Imaginatorium (talk) 04:34, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

The context here is not "what does 'all one case' mean?" but specifically about the CSS effect. Now whether it renders "Abc" as "ABC" vs "abc" vs "ABC" is an interesting question. DMacks (talk) 04:42, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

I am an amateur, I have a habit of rambling, but 'confused' may be a bit of projection on your part, especially because I've just rewritten the rest of the article to help make your very points more clear.

—Since I actually cannot for the life of me find a representative image for the effect of the CSS property or the underlying OpenType property, I've made one myself. Maybe we could use this in the article?

Remsense聊 04:51, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

It really should not be necessary, but I am not saying any of the editors trying to write about this are confused, I am saying that this bit of "CSS specification" (or whateveritis) is confused rambling nonsense, and should be ignored. Your (Remsense) example try is creative and mildly entertaining, but plainly it is not in any coherent sense "unicase", since the 'a's are lowercase and the 'T's are uppercase, for example. Actually, you could say that some letters ('o' or 's', for example) are "unicase" in the sense that there is only a size difference. So perhaps each letter should be displayed as the closest letter in alphabetical order which has this property? Imaginatorium (talk) 05:21, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

I agree that this example is needlessly confusing...even moreso than the standard itself. DMacks (talk) 07:12, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

...but it does actually hit the "unic" spec well.[1] DMacks (talk) 07:32, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Please note you are not agreeing with me. You say the example is "needlessly confusing", but I described it as "creative and mildly entertaining". It does occur to me that the font used in the example might actually be described as "unicase", because from a jumble of uc and lc forms it provides constant-height text with no possibility of distinguishing cases. Perhaps this is actually what someone was thinking of... but if the spec is as vague as it sounds, no-one else quite caught on. Look, what I am really trying to say is that (excluding any contribution from me) I bet that more thought and care has gone into attempts to write this WP article than ever went into generating the spec. Imaginatorium (talk) 07:40, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

You said 'it is not in any coherent sense "unicase"', which reads as if you think it is confusing...either self-inconsistent or else not fully consistent with the spec. It is in fact literally "unicase". It seems like it's easy to confuse "unicase" with "all upper-case" or "all lower-case", a mistake I myself made before I found the spec in my previous message. DMacks (talk) 07:54, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

References