From: Ernest Cline (ernestcline@mindspring.com)
Date: Fri Mar 05 2004 - 19:11:09 EST
As I said, I can see the point you made concerning the i.t.a., Michael
but that does not affect the point that I made that there are at least
three different variants that have been used in American English
dictionaries of the same basic concept, representing a voiced
th in a manner that is readable as a plain text th if one ignores
the typographic cruft.
TH WITH STRIKETHROUGH
ITALIC TH LIGATED BY HOOK
PLAIN TH LIGATED BY CROSSBAR
three separate glyphic representations of the same character
LEXICOGRAPHIC VOICED TH
found in printed American English dictionaries that are designed
to be readable as th, but typographically set apart to indicate
how the word is to be pronounced The exact representation
of the typographic difference does not matter so long as it is
consistent within the same document but does not have to be
consistent between documents. This is unlike the i.t.a. where
the typographic distinction must be consistent even between
different documents. That need for consistency between
documents is why I now agree that the i.t.a. character should
not be unified with this one.
Now if one were to take a dictionary that used any one of those
three forms mentioned above and consistently replaced one
glyph with another throughout the dictionary, would there truly
be any difference in the text? If you can point out how that
would be the case, I'll gladly concede the point.
As for the name used for this character, I don't really have
a preference as long as it does not lock in one specific
glyph.
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