Re: Bantu click letters

From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Thu Jun 10 2004 - 13:58:13 CDT

  • Next message: Peter Constable: "RE: Some thoughts on encoding specialized notations: was RE: Bantu click letters"

    At 13:50 -0400 2004-06-10, jcowan@reutershealth.com wrote:
    >Michael Everson scripsit:
    >
    >> You have a weird view of the history of phonetics, John. You haven't
    >> addressed the substantive issue: these are Latin characters used to
    >> represent sounds which in 1925 could not easily be represented.
    >
    >And never have been represented thus since.

    You don't KNOW that. You assert that. This is the "adversarial" style
    I was objecting to, John. Could you please take this on board?

    It is one thing for me to make a proposal with evidence from one
    document and have it questioned. (I have on many other occasions
    proposed archaic phonetic characters with as much evidence and had
    them accepted, which is one reason I think the grilling is a bit
    gratuitious here.) But it is QUITE another thing for you to come out
    and say that there are no other documents which make use of the same
    characters.

    >In their day, there were probably a lot more documents using LATIN
    >CAPITAL LETTER ANTISIGMA and LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H LEFT HALF than
    >one, yet they are not encoded either.

    HETA is on my to-do list. Isn't ANTISIGMA the GREEK CAPITAL REVERSED
    LUNATE SIGMA that's under ballot?

    > > Indeed, there are click letters like the STRETCHED C
    >> which did get into IPA and were later deprecated. So you can
    >> represent the STRETCHED C in chu: as Doke writes it (as do Pullum and
    >> Ladusaw, using Doke's diacritics as well) but you can't represent
    >> Doke's other letters? This doesn't make sense.
    >
    >It makes sense because others used STRETCHED C (and indeed it was
    >part of the standard for a while), but no one has used OWL before or since.

    Prove it.

    -- 
    Michael Everson * * Everson Typography *  * http://www.evertype.com
    


    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jun 10 2004 - 14:04:14 CDT