From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Mon Dec 08 2003 - 21:18:06 EST
At 17:27 -0800 2003-12-08, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>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's right. Peter Constable posted an example.
>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.
All right.
>[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.]
As would I.
>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.
A modified capital P would probably do.
>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.
I won't fight you on this one.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Dec 08 2003 - 22:21:33 EST