RE: Bantu click letters

From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Thu Jun 10 2004 - 09:11:46 CDT

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    > From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]
    On
    > Behalf Of Michael Everson

    > The sounds they represent are idiosyncratic and difficult to
    > describe, much less write. Personal? No: he published. Novel? Perhaps
    > (in 1925); Doke is likely to have devised them. Private use? Be
    > serious, John. That's a pretty ridiculous suggestion.

    If no other author uses them, then I think it's not unreasonable to
    suggest that they are private-use: Doke puts the terms of the agreement
    into his product, his readers enter into that agreement when they decide
    to read the book. It is "private-use" as opposed to conventional use if
    the readers agree to read his symbols but don't adopt them for their own
    use.

    Of course, it's an empirical question as to whether anyone else in that
    era did, in fact, adopt any of these symbols, or whether authors today
    ever use them (e.g. in citing Doke, whose work was of some importance in
    Africanist linguistics).

    Peter Constable



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