[KS] The Mystery of the Breve

[Donald Baker]

I use a Mac rather than Windows, so I am much more comfortable using  
breves than Brother Anthony is. Anytime I want to use a breved vowel,  
I simply go to the "character palette," which I can easily access via  
the language menu on the top of my screen (one of the first things I  
do when I get a new Mac is install the breved vowels in the favorites  
panel in the character palette.)  All I have to do is highlight the  
breved vowel and click the insert button. The vowel with the breve  
above it the appears in my email, word-processing documents, etc. Of  
course, sometimes those who receive my emails or read electronic  
versions of my papers get a strange mark instead of the intended  
vowel, but it's not my fault if they don't use a Mac!  (Actually,  
Unicode should work on any platform to reveal those breves.) Also, I  
can insert vowels with breves into search engines. Unfortunately,  
those search engines don't always recognize the difference between a  
vowel with a breve and the same vowel without (though quite a few  
library search engines do recognize that difference).

To answer Brother Anthony's question, most of the time I don't find it  
particularly troublesome to use breves. And I find them more useful  
than the alternative in highlighting the difference between o and ŏ,  
and between u and ŭ (I hope you can read the second character in each  
of those pairs.)

Don Baker


  On 12-Sep-0I 9, at 6:35 PM, Brother Anthony wrote:

> I hope that I might ask a question related to romanization but  
> separate from the work of the committee. It concerns the technical  
> problem of the breves.
>
> Once upon a time, the scholar wrote his text with a fountain pen,  
> including the breves. He passed it to his secretary to be typed; she  
> added the breves with her fountain pen after typing. It went to the  
> printer who set up the pages line by line on his linotype, stopping  
> to pick out the individual breved letters from their special boxes  
> with tweezers and inserting them by hand into their proper place in  
> the line of type he was setting. The line was cast and the text was  
> printed. It took time . . .
>
> Today, using a computer, if I want to search for a MR word which  
> includes a breved letter in a search engine, include such a word  
> into an email or into a blog or web page, I have first to open my  
> word-processing program, type the word, inserting the breved letter  
> as a 'special character' either using 'insert' or a shortcut, mark  
> it, copy it, move back to the other window, paste it and move ahead.  
> This is because it is completely impossible for anyone to simply  
> type a breved letter into any word-processing program, email  
> program, blog or webpage search or compose window in the way a  
> French person using a French keyboard can type an accented letter.
>
> In addition, we know that any email, blog, or web page into which we  
> have inserted such a special character will more often than not  
> (more than 50% of the time,  I am told) fail to work when viewed on  
> another computer, even using the same browser; the special  
> characters will usually be seen as ? or as some kind of blob.  
> Moreover, the text of a 500-page book composed on a PC using (say)  
> MSWord, into which we have carefully inserted breved characters as  
> above, once it has been sent to the editor or printer (not only in  
> the US) will usually be transported into a Mac environment. Each  
> breved character, to say nothing of apostrophes and the dashes if  
> not hyphens, disappears and someone has to go through the entire  
> text, looking at a printout of the original,  re-inserting the  
> breved characters etc (which is said to be especially tricky on a  
> Mac, I don't know). It is also not possible to use the MSWord  
> 'search and replace' function to introduce as 'replace' a word with  
> a breved let
> ter.
>
> So my question is: in the light of this set of problems with breved  
> letters, which are with us every day and will not be going away any  
> time soon, WHY is there still, in 2009, no concerted move among the  
> (very limited) number of people regularly using MR to revise it and  
> get rid of those impossible breves? What is the great advantage of  
> retaining them? Do they have magic powers? I just do not understand  
> it.
>
> Brother Anthony
> Sogang University, Seoul
> http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/
> Sogang University
>
>
>
>
>

Donald Baker
Department of Asian Studies
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2  Canada
don.baker at ubc.ca