Jonathan asked:
>
> If I consult the Atomic Theory document, I see that the following
> "variant forms" of Latin letters are already encoded in Unicode:
>
> OPEN E
> SQUAT ESH
> STRETCHED C
> LONG S
> R WITH FISHHOOK
>
> as well as quite a few Greek and Cyrillic letters.
>
> I don't know the stories behind these (though I may hope once more
> for the kind enlightenment of Ken Whistler), but would it be possible
> to make a case that both dotless j and dotless i are candidates for
> encoding based on similar reasoning to one or more of the above?
>
Otto Stolz already answered regarding the Long S.
Any of the other letters, encoded in the IPA extensions block
cannot be used for any kind of case regarding the dotless j.
025B LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN E
Is a bona fide IPA vowel, lower than [e]. There is no difficulty in
showing it in contrastive usage with [e] in phonetic text.
0285 LATIN SMALL LETTER SQUAT REVERSED ESH
Is the phonetic representation of an apical retroflex vowel, used
in the Sinological tradition (comparable to what could be represented
in IPA by adding a syllabic diacritic to a voiced retroflex fricative,
cf. U+0290). There is no difficulty in showing it in contrastive usage
with U+0283 ESH in phonetic text. In fact the fact that it is squat
is an artifact of its graphic etymology based on tacking a retroflex
hook onto U+027F and smoothing it out, rather than any clear relation
to its "ESH" namesake.
[BTW, if you want to fix Atomic Unicode, U+0285 was one that I
overlooked for the retroflex hook list. Yep, there's a retroflex
hook there, even though there is no "RETROFLEX HOOK" or "HOOK" or
"TAIL" in the name!]
0297 LATIN LETTER STRETCHED C
This is IPA for a palatal click. The shape of the letter may have been
suggested by a connection to [c] for a palatal plosive, but the two
sounds are completely distinct, except for their palatal point of
articulation. There is no difficulty in showing 0297 in contrastive
usage with [c] in phonetic text.
[BTW, the glyph for 0297 is misleadingly "c"-like in the Unicode 2.0
charts, and is being updated for the Unicode 3.0 charts.]
027E LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH FISHHOOK
This is the IPA for an alveolar flap or tap. (The intervocalic sound
of the t's or d's in "latter" or "ladder" as ordinarily pronounced
in English.) This is not an "r"; it contrasts with [r], which is
IPA for an alveolar trill. Again, there is no difficulty in showing
027E in contrastive usage with [r] in phonetic text.
So no dice here.
You cannot go backwards from a bunch of ISO character
names, many of which were invented rather quickly in committees to
fill out long lists, and assume putative relations between "variant"
characters on that basis. Simply because a bunch of characters got
"R" in their name does not make them variants of each other.
Yes there are some explicit variant letters used as math symbols in
the Greek block. The rationale for them is contrastive usage in
mathematical text.
None of these has anything to do with a putative dotless-j being
considered as a variant of j and thereby a candidate for encoding.
--Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT