From: Kent Karlsson (kentk@md.chalmers.se)
Date: Mon Jun 02 2003 - 15:25:08 EDT
> > The empty set symbol is a math symbol, not expected to ever occur
(properly)
> > in a word-like context. Capital O with stroke, however, is a
> > letter, and can easily and without any problems occur in a word-like
context.
>
> Which is exactly why it would be a terrible choice to indicate null in
> phonetic transcription
I don't understand this argument. It does not make sense to me.
(See also Ken's latest e-mail on this, where an example of the use
of epsilon for a linguistic "zero" is mentioned.)
> > IPA and other phonetic writings are AFAIK always lowercase
>
> Utterly wrong. Uppercase vowel symbols (**including Ø**) have
> been used in Americanist phonetics to indicate voiceless vocoids;
In such cases it would be a terrible choice to use the EMPTY SET
character
for denoting a linguistic "zero" of any kind, since in print one may not
be able to distinguish one of the vowels from a linguistic "zero".
> Capitals C and V are
> regularly used to denote generic consonant and vowel.
Then they are used as variables; not phonetic letters.
> Please abandon any suggestion of using U+00D8 to indicate
> null categories in linguistic transcriptions.
I have seen no indication that using U+00D8 for this would be an error.
(Not even from Ken, who otherwise provide excellent motivations; and
indeed provided another example where a letter (epsilon) is used for a
morphological "zero".)
/kent k
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