Appendix talk:Variations of 'a'

Obviously, this needs some kind of lovely table with space to indicate the significance of each particular form of "a". bd2412 T 15:56, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

What it and isn't a "variation"
The at the top of articles was originally an aid to help users find similarly spelled articles. Originally it was just for uppercase/lowercase differences, then came differences in accents, then came punctuation differences such as hyphenation, spacing, apostrophes etc.

Since then a small number of people have becoming interested in using it for anything related by visual form or sound, and even CJKV variants which look very different. These things are not confusing and do not help the original aims of the section but merely bog it down with lots of arcane stuff that is surely fun to find for some people.

These are the items I would keep is the section: a, A, 'a, A., A+, a+, a-, A-, -a, Ά, ā, Ā, á, Á, ǎ, Ǎ, à, À, å, Å, ä, Ä, â, Â, ã, Ã, ą, Ą since these all come under the original design goals of the template. The Greek forms, or at least the basic upper and lower forms since the uppercase forms are identical to the English forms and the lowercase form is very close to script English forms. The Cyrillic forms which are identical in both cases to the English. ª, ɐ, ɑ, ɒ are all variants of print or script English a modified by scaling, rotation, or flipping, and otherwise retain the English form.

These I would not keep: æ, Æ - ligatures are made up of two letters. These are not confused with or similar to a - they are combined with them. They would be confused with or similar to things such as ae, A.E. if such exist and they belong there, not here. The Hebrew and Arabic represent some prototype of the same letter and sometimes a similar sound of the English letter, but will never be confused with the English letters. ɶ is a combination of o and e and might be confusable with æ but certainly not with a.

&mdash; Hippietrail 20:13, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I think the examples with variations in capitalization, punctuation, and diacritics, along with the similar Cyrillic and Greek forms, are enough to justify having an appendix for the letter instead of listing all of the variants at the top of the entry for each character. If we're going to have this appendix, I see no reason not to also include the Hebrew, Arabic, etc. It costs us nothing, and may be of some use to somebody. Cheers! bd2412 T 20:24, 28 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Oh I'm not against the appendix at all. It's a good idea. Add all kinds of stuff! But if the appendix is supposed to be a step toward adding all of this stuff to the section that would be a bad idea. &mdash; Hippietrail 15:40, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
 * But the Appendix is a substitute for the section. In other words, it's a step towards eliminating that section altogether for the handful of entries that have more variables than the template can adequately handle. bd2412 T 18:07, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Oh well I think that's a bad idea. Having two ways to do the same thing will be confusing to people, especially if one is much rarer than the other and also includes a lot of extra stuff that will make it harder for the person trying to find what they're looking for but don't know how to enter on the keyboard. &mdash; Hippietrail 18:13, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Harder? How? You click the link and it takes you to a neatly organized page with all the variations, which are (roughly) in order of importance, so you wouldn't have to look far down the page unless you're looking for a really obscure use anyway. I've looked through the letters of the alphabet, and the only other letter that should require such an appendix is e. All other letters (and all words) are, so far as I can find, sufficiently limited in variation for the existing template to suffice. So, there should only be two of these appendices, for a and for e. Cheers. bd2412 T 19:18, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Ok, maybe o as well, in light of the resemblance to 0, and all the Vietnamese variations. But that's it. bd2412 T 19:39, 31 March 2007 (UTC)