Re: IPA a vowels

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Fri Sep 10 1999 - 14:11:31 EDT


Michael Everson wrote, in response to Robert Brady:

>> 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 agree with both Robert and Michael regarding these three. Having made a
font which contained both IPA and Greek support, I can vouch that this
unification causes problems: the sorting problem Michael mentioned and also
a design problem because the Greek glyphs are not necessarily appropriate
in the IPA context (e.g. they tend to be more cursive than their Latin
counterparts).

On the other hand, I have not encountered similar problems in the
unification of the open front vowel with the Latin lowercase a, nor do I
see a need for a separate codepoint for the double storey g (i.e.
looptail), particularly since this form does not appear in standard IPA
notation and has no semantic value distinct from Latin letter g.

John Hudson, Type Director

Tiro Typeworks
Vancouver, BC
www.tiro.com
tiro@tiro.com



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:51 EDT