Talk:Palochka

Etymology

From Russian па́лочка (páločka, “little stick”), diminutive of па́лка (pálka, “stick”). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/palochka --Manfariel (talk) 13:07, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

Introduction

Someone wanted to delete this paragraph: It looks exactly like uppercase Latin letter I and has no lowercase form. As of 2004, palochka cannot be readily entered or displayed on most computer systems, so it is usually replaced with Latin letter I, or sometimes even with the digit 1, although technically this is incorrect. with this comment: (1) It only looks like I when I doesn't have lines at the top and bottom; 2) it is present in Unicode which is supported by Windows XP, Windows 2000, Linux, MacOSX...

First, palochka has many forms, including serif forms. Second, while palochka is included in Unicode, still very often it will not show up on screen or on paper. E.g. Internet Explorer won't show it until you specify a font containing palochka. And there is no way to enter palochka on a keyboard directly (but you can select in in Character Map). — Monedula 08:56, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

According to http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html , Unicode Consortium and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2 are planning to add the small letter palochka in a newer version of Unicode (at 04CF). --Hello World! 14:44, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

HTML entities ?

"Its HTML entities are...": no, these are not HTML entities. These are character references, and once you know the Unicode code points you also know how to write the character references (add '&#x' in front and ';' after). In other words: this is both wrong and superflouous. --LarsMarius 13:24, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

That's correct ! But in the SGML/HTML/XML terminology there are two kinds of entities : « numerical character references » (defined for all characters using the numerical value of their Unicode/ISO 10646 assigned code points, and referencing a non-mutable entity which is a single Unicode/ISO 10646 character), and « named character references » (which designates a redefinable reference to an entity made of zero or more characters, if the associated DTD is loaded and processed by a *validating* parser to recognize these names, unless these entities are forcibly predefined by the document metalanguage). In HTML/SGML/XML, the codes you see or type are not the entities (the only entity you see is the whole document in which these codes are inserted, along with its associated metadata such as its media type and its initial encoding).

So there's nothing really wrong if one says, in an abbreviated way, "HTML entities are...", but it is both superfluous and too much specialized, and somewhat ambiguous about the effective technical meaning or scope of the sentence.

We should just better speak about the assigned Unicode/ISO 10646 code points (which are independant of the SGML/HTML/XML technologies, and which also cover other technologies: notably the encodings, conversion tables and algorithms, and character charts, across various text encodings and text transport syntaxes). verdy_p (talk) 00:09, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Lower case

Give that there is already a lower case version of the palotchka, does it still make sense to have the example words (i.e., елъэӀуащ) using the upper case letter in the middle of the word? I always see examples with upper case rather than lower case, and I wonder whether this is correct... Malafaya (talk) 14:09, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

The Cyrillic alphabets with the Palochka were introduced in about 1938. The lowercase version was not added to Unicode until July 2006. Most texts in these alphabets have only had one form of Palochka available to them, and common practice is still to use only one form. —Coroboy (talk) 11:58, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

No. Before the Unicode character was encoded, the lowercased version entered was the Arabo-European digit 1...

The case distinctions are not just formal, so even if you don't have the new Unicode character (with the semantic of a letter), you should write « елъэ1уащ » with that digit, but not « елъэӀуащ » with the uppercase letter appearing randomly in the middle of the word. Even typographically, with good fonts that correctly renders the digit 1 with the height of a lowercase letter, in a way similar to the Greek iota from which it was historically borrowed (modern fonts tend to render all digits with the same height, that of an uppercase letter, but those modern fonts, such as "Courier New", "Arial" or even "Times" and "Times New Roman", are typographically ugly; they should better only make those digits the same width, just like with the excellent "Segoe UI" font).

Of course the digit may seem strange to some parsers in some technical contexts where digits are not acceptable (only because they attempt to recognize technical abbreviations, including numbers written with digits, because they are also technical abbreviations, without relation to the phonemic origin of alphabets and orthographies for noting the spoken language in a mutually understandable way independant of the allowed phonetic variations).

But for normal linguistic (non-technical) usage, using the digit is perfectly valid (and as much valid as the historic use of letters in most alphabets to note numbers in an abbreviated form). verdy_p (talk) 23:51, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Please provide some evidence for your claim that "Before the Unicode character was encoded, the lowercased version entered was the Arabo-European digit 1". In all books and web sites I have seen, there is only one case version of Palochka. See, for example, all the external links from the Wikipedia pages for languages which use the Palochka, and the Wikipedia pages in those languages. These pages use various, and sometimes mixed, representations of Palochka, but only in one case form.

As noted on the page for the Avar language, Palochka "is often replaced with a capital Latin letter I, small Latin letter l or the digit 1", but these are alternatives for the letter, not case variations of it.

Your claims about how the lowercase should be used, how good fonts correctly render the digit 1, and what fonts are typographically ugly are all subjective and have no bearing on the facts of how Palochka is in fact used. —Coroboy (talk) 10:49, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

I've never seen the lowercase palochka used in actual texts. It's always uppercase. I don't know why was it added to Unicode. The examples here should be real and thus they should only use uppercase Ӏ. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 07:21, 12 February 2016 (UTC)