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Character Stories: U+013F, U+0140 Latin Capital / Small L with Middle Dot

Peter Constable, 2004-04-16

[Source: Eric Muller, Unicode list, 2002-8-6]

U+0140 LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH MIDDLE DOT is intended to be used in Catalan (‘ŀl’ is pronounced as two separate ‘l’ while ‘ll’ is pronounced as in ‘million’). However... everybody seems to use U+006C U+00B7 U+006C.

[Source: Ken Whistler, Unicode list, 2002-8-6]

There is no particular reason to use the l· as a single character, when all the 8859-based and Windows 1252 implementations would be using U+00B7 for the middle dot.

Consider U+0140 as effectively a compatibility character for ISO 6937. It is mapped to 0xF7 in that standard. It is also mapped to 0xA9A8 in Code Page 949 (Korean) — which probably got it from ISO 6937 in the first place.

[Source: Ken Whistler, Unicode list, 2004-4-15, edited]

It should be noted that there is a decomposition for U+0140 in the Unicode Character Database...

It is a compatibility decomposition for two reasons: the decomposition into the sequence <006C, 00B7> may result in rendering differences (both because of potentially different decisions about where the render the dot and because the introduction of the U+00B7 MIDDLE DOT might impact line break decisions, depending on the implementation); secondly, the properties of the characters in the sequence <006C, 00B7> are distinct from those for <0140> by itself, and may impact things such as identifier parsing, again, depending on an implementation. And, as I indicated before, U+0140 is itself basically a compatibility character, introduced for mapping to ISO 6937, a preexisting standard that was among the list of character encoding standards intended to be covered by the initial Unicode repertoire.

[Source: Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin, Unicode list, 2004-3-26, edited]

Catalan usual orthography uses a regular middle dot to separate two “L”s in those cases where they are pronounced as a single one, doubled only for etymological reasons.

This dot is not connected to the previous "L" in any way, as if it were some kind of diacritical. It is a standalone character — akin to the hyphen in French or Portuguese...

I advise removal of the note “Catalan” under U+0140 and U+013F, and perhaps replacement of the whole note with «for Catalan use U+006C U+00B7» (respectively, U+004C).

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