Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 9ce1d38: Use curved quotes in core elisp diagnostics

[Paul Eggert]

Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> this is not what you can see on the common
> all-uppercase inscriptions (cf. Capitalis and Capitalis monumentalis).
> So it seems that ASCII is *sufficient*  to write correct Latin.

Yes and no.  Many people look at ancient uppercase Latin inscriptions and don’t 
notice the accents or the interpuncts or the distinction between LATIN CAPITAL 
LETTER I and LATIN EPIGRAPHIC LETTER I LONGA, because they’ve been programmed to 
think in the modern ASCII-only style for Latin.  Similarly, many of us spell the 
English word “naive” instead of “naïve” and reword other common English 
constructions that don't fit in ASCII, and in that sense ASCII is “sufficient” 
to write correct English.  Still, if your job had been to carve the inscription 
on the first-century shrine of the Augustales at Herculaneum, which reads:

  AVGVSTÓ·SACR·
  A·A·LV́CIꟾ·A·FꟾLIꟾ·MEN·
  PROCVLVS·ET·IV́LIÁNVS·
  P · S ·
  DÉDICÁTIÓNE·DECVRIÓNIBVS·ET·
  AVGVSTÁLIBVS·CÉNAM·DEDÉRVNT

and if you’d declined to carve it that way on the grounds that you wanted to 
stick to ASCII, you probably would have been fired.

My source for the inscription text:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_%28diacritic%29#Details

A photo of the inscription:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herculaneum_Collegio_degli_Augustali_Iscrizione.jpg

800px-Piranesi-TombaScipioBarbatus.jpg
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