From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Mon Dec 08 2003 - 20:27:14 EST
Michael Everson asked:
> Your solution then, for Athapascan orthography?
First of all, the preferred spellings are Athabascan (or
Athabaskan [ANLC] or Athapaskan [Smithsonian]).
There are *many* Athabascan orthographies, not just one,
of course. See:
http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/orthography.html
for a whole series of practical orthographies for Alaskan
Athabascan languages. Those do *not* make case distinctions,
per se, but when set in type, they often make use of
English conventions for capitalizing initial words and such.
And they use U+0027 for the glottal stop (and ejectives).
That's why they are "practical" orthographies. They work
fine with ASCII.
Athabascan languages in Canada are also written with
practical orthographies such as these, as well as with
more technical orthographies. And of course in Canada, some
Athabascan languages are also written with syllabics (which
also don't make case distinctions).
When using these practical orthographies with apostrophes
for glottal stop, casing has never come into question,
as far as I can tell. Nobody is agitating for an uppercase
apostrophe.
Technical orthographies are based on Americanist usage
generally, or more recently, IPA. Americanist usage showed
many forms for a glottal stop, including directional
apostrophes, but also all the variants shown in Pullum
and Ladusaw. Many of these were none other than font hacks
(or literally the result of hacking or filing the dot off
a question mark on a typewriter keyboard) of a question
mark to get the appropriate shapes. You also find
orthographies that substituted an actual question mark
for the glottal stop because a dotless form was not
available.
For an IPA-based example, see:
http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/langs/papers/holton.pdf
a dissertation on Tanacross (Tanana) phonology.
For these, and thousands of other documents published on
Athabascan languages over the last century, there was just
a glottal stop -- not an uppercase and a lowercase glottal
stop. And that glottal stop is represented by
U+0294 in Unicode. And anyone who has represented any
Athabascan data with a glottal stop (as opposed to an
apostrophe or a question mark) in the last decade has been
using U+0294 LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP for it.
The glyph for the glottal stop in Unicode is the (IMO)
ugly cap-height glyph with the serif base. Why? Well,
that is pretty easy to determine. It is because that is
what the IPA settled on for their prescriptive preference
for the shape of a glottal stop. (Note: for a *glottal stop*,
not for a *capital glottal stop*. The IPA does not have
casing distinctions.) The prestige of the IPA specification
is such that many fonts have used that form as well. And,
indeed, it influenced the choice for the Unicode
representative glyph, which in turn has influenced what
OS vendors have put in their fonts. So, while there
are multiple different glyphs in print for a glottal stop
(see Pullum & Ladusaw for different examples), most of
which don't *look like* capital letters, the IPA glyph
has become the preferred one, simply because IPA prefers
it. And that is unfortunate, because that one glyph is
the one that people think *looks like* a capital letter,
and which thus causes the confusion when an orthographic
innovation decides it needs to introduce casing for it.
Now I presume from Michael's assertion that there is
some Athabascan community *somewhere* that has started
to make an initial case distinction for glottal stop,
and that in the fonts they use, their uppercase glottal
stop *looks like* the IPA glottal stop, and that for
the body text they innovated a miniature of same. Hence
the conclusion that we must treat the existing form
as the *capital* and need to encode a new lowercase
form.
That, however, is utterly backward. It is clear that in
these cases, following 100 years of monocase usage of
glottal stop, that the innovation (as in many adaptations
of IPA) is to create an uppercase letter to go with the
lowercase one. [By the way, I would like to get references
to the actual users and examples of their materials, to
see just how widespread this innovation actually is.]
In terms of font design, I concur with John Hudson's sense
of what would look harmonious as an uppercase/lowercase
pairing for a glottal stop in a typical font. However, to
accord with general IPA usage and the existing fonts showing
U+0294 should stay as they are. Then, *if* it turns out
that there is a convincing case to be made for separate
encoding of an uppercase glottal stop for such Athabascan
usage as may turn up, then the least damaging approach would
be, for the code charts, to use the kinds of uppercase
glyph models used in similar instances of after-the-fact
uppercase inventions based on IPA or other phonetic
alphabets and usages. Some good models to follow would
be: 0182/0183 b with topbar, 018B/018C d with topbar, and
0222/0223 ou, all of which involve an invented case pair
where somebody felt they had to have a "capital" letter,
but where the lowercase letter was already a cap-height one.
If this is then augmented with examples showing good
typographic practice and actual examples of text distinguishing
uppercase and lowercase glottal stop, that should be sufficient
to let people then design and use their fonts as desired,
without disturbing the identity of the already existing
encoded character, U+0294 LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP.
--Ken
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