Speakup Differential Pronounciation Of Strange Characters

[luke]

Hello

If anyone pulls up the ssh manual page, and looks for the third occurrence 
of the word "character" (I.E.

man ssh
/character
nn

), you will see a line similar to this, at the top of your screen:

line.  The escape character followed by a dot (".") closes the

On my system, I assume for UTF-8 reasons, if I am reading the screen, 
speakup reads the parenthesized quoted period as:

(O circumflex. O circumflex)

If I read through that character by character, I get:

left paren
cap gamma
null
null
dot
cap gamma
null
null
right paren

If I run "unicode_start" before looking at the page, the full screen 
version is:

left paren. right paren

The character by character version is:

left paren
null
dot
null
right paren

I find every aspect of this to be strange.

I am no expert on terminal handling: does anyone have any thoughts on what 
may be going on here?

First why the supposed quotation show up in this way at all, but secondly 
why speakup is pronouncing these things as "o circumflex" when read as a 
phrase, but pronouncing them as "cap gamma null null" when read 
individually.  I assume that it is reading them as punctuation.

Luke