From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Thu May 29 2003 - 19:24:14 EDT
At 02:56 PM 5/29/03 -0700, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>António asked:
>
> > I've just downloaded the PDF files with 4.0 additions (U40-*.pdf). One
> > question: How is one supposed to tell apart the glyphs for U+1D29 and
> > U+1D18?... Or one isn't?... (OK, this question is probably more suited
> > to be posed to IPA, but.)
>
>Visually, you usually couldn't, any more than you can tell
>apart U+0050 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER P and U+03A1 GREEK CAPITAL
>LETTER RHO in a typical, stylistically harmonized font.
>
>Don't ask me to vouch for and explain the vagaries of Uralic
>notational practice, which I find alien. ;-) My expectation
>would be that practitioners would not use both U+1D18
>(a small-cap P, for a "semi-voiced" [p] sound -- not really
>a well-defined IPA concept) and U+1D29 (a small-cap RHO,
>for voiceless uvular trill, = IPA <U+0280, U+0325>) in
>the same transcription, however, as even they would get
>confused.
The proposal ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N2419 said this:
>4. LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL P and GREEK LETTER SMALL CAPITAL RHO
>(X-1D18, X-0373).
>These letters look alike but are distinct; one is a semi-voiced [p] sound
>contrasting with UPA p, and
>the other is a voiceless uvular trill [R ] contrasting with UPA Ú U+03C1
>the voiced uvular trill [R].
This begs the question of how the *reader* of this notation will be able to
decide which is which. This is UNLIKE the case of the latin and Greek
alphabets, where in the context of Latin text you use P for P and in the
Greek text you use P for RHO and keyboards will keep you honest on text
entyr and the distinction in character code is needed for case mapping
rather than display, since p and rho look rather different.
In the case of UPA there would need to be the need for a similar context to
help decide which is which, but even then, if there is no visual or context
distinction (other than the intended meaning), it's hard to keep texts
accurately coded.
A./
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