IPA Greek (was Re: Posting Links to Ballots (was: RE: Why blackletter letters?))

On 2013-09-12, Michael Everson <everson_at_evertype.com> wrote:
> On 12 Sep 2013, at 09:07, Julian Bradfield <jcb+unicode_at_inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Interesting. I see that disunification of the remaining IPA greek letters is proceeding by stealth -
>
> No, Julian. It's by design. Only theta remains.

Hm, that's not what the comments in some of the working documents
suggest:-) "not intended for use with the IPA" for chi.

>> we have latin chi thanks to German dialectologists, and latin beta thanks to Gabonese. My question is,
>> why should they not be used for IPA ?
>
> I think they should. I will be taking this up with the Association.

Then we have the problem that LATIN SMALL LETTER CHI seems to be (as
originally named) a stretched x, which is what the uvular fricative
sign *ought* to look like to be properly harmonious, but the IPA seems
determined that it looks like a upright greek chi - wrong stroke bias,
no roman serifs (in the current version), swung terminations to the
TL-BR stroke.
You describe this in your web page, but I'm not sure what you think
the reference glyph should be: did the dialectologists use a true
stretched x? I have tried using a stretched x in my transcriptions,
and I have to say it looks weird!

> No, just theta. The bizarrely-names Latin ʊ is already in use by the Association.

Very true. Somehow I hadn't noticed that ʋ was there - and also
bizarrely named, since as PSG observes, it looks much more like upsilon
than ʊ does. Why it was called V WITH HOOK rather than SCRIPT V? Was
it for Africanist reasons?

-- 
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.