From: William J Poser (wjposer@ldc.upenn.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 12 2005 - 12:13:02 CDT
The usage in my paper about the Carrier "syllabics" isn't really
relevant, partly because it really just represents an attempt to
get something that looks halfway right into TeX and mostly because
it isn't in the CLC writing system. That paper uses IPA (to be
precise "North American variant" IPA - I think I'm going to standardize
it) along with the syllabics, not the Carrier Linguistic Committee
writing system.
I've vacillated as to what the correct IPA transcription should be.
One possibility is to mark the dentality of lamino-dentals, in which
case they would be <s>, <z>, etc. plus U+032A Combining Bridge Below.
but at times I've felt that the laminality was the key thing.
My point about the state of the language and the apico-alveolar/lamino-dental
distinction was not that the distinction does not need to be encoded
but that (a) there is no existing standard and (b) it isn't likely that
a great deal of additional material in the practical writing system
with this distinction marked is going to be produced, so any standard
will be artificial. We could easily enough poll the small number of
people who care about such things as to which diacritic they prefer
and produce a Yinka Dene Language Institute or Tribal Council
standard, but people would generally continue to do whatever
they felt like anyhow, if they wrote the distinction at all.
I know its not easy to believe for people concerned with these fine
details, such as professional typographers and encoding specialists,
but nobody involved with the Carrier language has ever spent any
time thinking about such issues. The original intent, as it were, was
"we'll write these using the underscore on the typewriter". Decisions
as to how to translate that into the fonts available for printing
a particular book, or into TeX, or into HTML, have been ad hoc
decisions of individuals, based largely on convenience. In TeX and
HTML for example, using underlining (\b in TeX, <u>..</u> in HTML)
is a bit easier than having recourse to special characters or
character references. I'm not suggesting that there's no point
in choosing a standard - my point is that it isn't really the case
that there is a an existing standard that can be discovered by
careful study of existing texts. In this case "the truth is not out
there".
-- Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer@alum.mit.edu
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