From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Wed Apr 02 2003 - 15:49:23 EST
> Creating
> palatal-hook v's, x's, k's, s's, and so on if they are not
> in significant use and when multiple, equally accurate,
> alternative representations are available, may not be the best
> thing to do.
Incidentally, reviewing Pullum and Ladusaw (1986) to help
provide the definitive answer on the retroflex thread reminded
me that we knew about these things back in 1989. Pullum
and Ladusaw (1986) give, on p. 228, a rectified version of
a chart of Russian palalized consonants from Catford (1977),
Fundamental Problems in Phonetics. That chart lists:
p, b, m, f, v, t, d, n, l, r, s, z all with palatal hooks.
(Two were corrected by Pullum and Ladusaw from the actual
glyphs that Catford used.) The same list can be seen on
p. 263 of the 1996 version of Pullum and Ladusaw.
But we saw no evidence of general use of these characters.
In fact, the n-palatal-hook form shown there put a hook
on the *right* leg of the n, easily confused with an eng
and not matching the left-leg-hooked n U+0272 LATIN SMALL
LETTER N HOOK widely used for a palatal nasal stop in IPA.
So the list from Pullum and Ladusaw was *deliberately*
omitted from encoding back in 1989 when the candidates
for the IPA extensions were originally assembled, using
Pullum and Ladusaw (and other sources), and in direct
consultation with Geoffrey Pullum at one point.
So once again, I would like to see evidence of use of
these characters in a context where available alternatives
are not feasible, before we just go ahead and encode
a bunch more characters for these.
--Ken
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