Re: Hooks and Curls and Bars, oh my (was: New contribution)

From: Ernest Cline (ernestcline@mindspring.com)
Date: Fri May 07 2004 - 09:15:54 CDT


> [Original Message]
> From: Philippe Verdy <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr>
>
> From: "Ernest Cline" <ernestcline@mindspring.com>
> > (Besides, I think unifying the phonetic
> > symbols with Latin was a mistake done solely to ease the transition
> > from legacy encodings.)
>
> But the phonetics notation allowed by IPA is still useful to represent
languages
> that still don't have a defined orthography. When time elapses, and
literacy
> levels in that language progresses, such phonetic notations will tend to
be
> borrowed as a standard way to write that language, and then extended to
> include other Latin script features such as letter cases.
>
> Some time in the future, I bet that most IPA symbols will evolve into
plain
> Latin cased letter pairs, if they are kept in the orthography.

I never said IPA wasn't useful, I just think it would have been better if
it had
been defined as separate script and when an IPA symbol turned into a
cased Latin letter pair, to have added two letters instead of one. IPA has
both a lack of case, and a stricter definition of glyph shape than Latin
does
which to my mind provide a difference between IPA and Latin. However,
I don't think that disunification there is going to happen in general, altho
I do think that a and g need to be disunified from the IPA symbols since
IPA assumes that they have forms which they don't have in all fonts.

LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH HOOK
and
LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH LOWER LOOP

What do you think? Would it be worth coming up with a formal proposal
for these two to disunify the IPA symbols from LATIN SMALL LETTER A
and LATIN SMALL LETTER G? That would allow for fonts that don't
normally use the IPA forms for LATIN SMALL LETTER A and
LATIN SMALL LETTER G to support IPA if they wished.



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