Re: IPA a vowels

From: Michael Everson (everson@indigo.ie)
Date: Fri Sep 10 1999 - 09:27:47 EDT


Ar 05:09 -0700 1999-09-10, scríobh Robert Brady:

>It is possible, and perhaps desirable, to produce an IPA font where the
>default <a> for use in latin orthrogaphy, is a nonhook-a. Similarly with
>strange and non-strange g.

Hunh?

>IPA has got a LATIN SMALL LETTER SCRIPT G as well. The corresponding
>character, LATIN SMALL LETTER NONSCRIPT G, (or similar) has been unified
>with LATIN SMALL LETTER G, in a similar demonstration of brokenness :
>where two glyphs that are used of variants of one grapheme, and used
>contrastitively in other situations, have been encoded as two code points,
>rather than the needed three.

By the same token we'd need three for I, DOTLESS I, and DOTTED I for
Turkish. But no one wants to do this. (Probably because huge amounts of
Turkish data do something else.)

>This adds to the IPA brokeness in Unicode. I hope we see :
>
> LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH HOOK,
> LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH FUNNY THING BELOW,

recte LOOPTAIL G.

> LATIN SMALL LETTER THETA,
> LATIN SMALL LETTER CHI,
> LATIN SMALL LETTER BETA,
>
>in Unicode 4. There are only 5 of these. There will not be any more, and
>without them, IPA support in Unicode is broken.

I support the last three because of the functionality issue of sorting
Greek and IPA text (in Latin transcription Beta is not supposed to sort
after z, which it does with the unification). I think the case for the
first two is dodgy. What do you do about inputting? Right now my IPA fonts
have a on a and round-a on A.

See Pullum and Ladusaw on the issues.

--
Michael Everson * Everson Gunn Teoranta * http://www.indigo.ie/egt
15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire/Ireland
Guthán: +353 1 478 2597 ** Facsa: +353 1 478 2597 (by arrangement)
27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn;  Baile an Bhóthair;  Co. Átha Cliath; Éire



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