RE: Glottal stops (bis) (was RE: Missing African Latin letters (bis))

From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Tue Dec 09 2003 - 02:26:07 EST

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    From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org on behalf of Kenneth Whistler

    >Athabascan languages in Canada are also written with
    >practical orthographies such as these
     
    At least two of which (Dogrib and one or both varieties of Slavey) use a cased glottal stop, not U+0027.
     
     
    >Nobody is agitating for an uppercase
    >apostrophe.

    Not in Canada, that I know of. (I've seen indication of languages in Russia that have a case distinction for ' and possible also ".)

     
    >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.
     
    That's true of phonetic transcriptions. But for orthographies, there are some that have case.
     
     
     
    >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.)
     
    Which only tells us that there should be no predisposition to consider the glottal stop upper rather than lower case, or vice versa. It does not tell us that that character cannot be involved in a case-pair relationship.
     
     
     
    >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.
     
    All of which is very germane to my argument.
     
     
    >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.
     
    Not only "think" looks like, but behave as though it is.

    >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,
     
    This thread began when I provided a scanned image.
     

    >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 alone is not the basis of the argument. You have provided the basis for additional, strong argumentation yourself: 0294 cannot be displayed using the lowercase glyph as it's design as a cap-height letter is well established in many fonts. If a new upper-case glottal character is created, a distinct lowercase glottal would be needed, but then there would be two characters (0294 and the new UC glottal) that have exactly the same appearance and would be getting confused with mixed up and inconsistent data and processes for years to come.

    >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.
     
    This argument is completely empty, as it depends on the premise that the existing character can be considered "the lowercase one". You have asserted it to be so, but you have not given reasoning why it must be considered so. That seems to be especially required given that you observe in the same breath that during the 100 years of its usage this character has been monocase.
     
    Let's roll back the discussion for a moment. Suppose before this thread had started up someone had come along and said, "0294 is obviously caseless and has always been so; it should have a general category of Lo rather than Ll, just like the dental click (01C0) and other caseless phonetic symbols." Would you be able to make an compelling argument that it must be Ll and not Lo? I don't see how anyone possibly could.
     
    But to maintain the premise that this only-ever-monocased character is "the lowercase one", you've got to have solid reasons to say it could not be Lo and must be Ll.
     
    IMO, it takes an emporer willing to wear clothes spun with thread that "only the wisest could see" to say that, though the cap-height character the Dogrib and Slavey are using as a capital has *exactly* the same appearance and metrics as 0294, it is actually the thing that is half the height and has a different shape that's the same as 0294, and that this exact replica is really a new innovation.
     
    Ken, you have not given reasons why 0294 cannot be considered uppercase -- no evidence that it has in the past been used as lowercase in a case pair, or that usage as an uppercase in a case pair would result in problems in implementation, usability, or management of data. You have merely asserted that the original character was a lowercase character (for no evident reason given usage has until now only ever been caseless), and on that basis concluded that 0294 must be and remain lowercase. You also have not responded to my argument that to keep 0294 as Ll now that a case distinction has developed in which the uppercase has exactly that appearance will certainly lead to problems in usability and data management.
     
     
    >[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.]

    Whenever a new character is being proposed, it shouldn't matter how large the user community is, provided there is a real user community that has a reasonably-durable need. I don't see why this is any different. The communities, I have identified; I can get more specific details before preparing a proposal. There are SIL linguistics working with at least the Dogrib community, and they have asked me to get what the language community needs added to Unicode.
     

    >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.
     
    Nobody is asking us for suggestions as to how to design their characters; they've already figured that out on their own. All they want is for their new character -- an x-height lowercase character to pair with a cap-height character -- to be encoded.
     
     
    >However, to
    >accord with general IPA usage and the existing fonts showing
    >U+0294 should stay as they are.
     
    On that point, then, we are in complete agreement.
     
     
    >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,
     
    Your statement assumes a conclusion for which you have not provided adequate argumentation. There *is* good evidence for a case pair; there *are* arguments for treating 0294 as the capital in that pair; you have presented a case against that, though IMO it's more assertion than argumentation.
     
     
    >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.

    This would be simply ignoring what the communities are actually using. It's bad enough that Hurons have not used 0222/0223 because the representative glyphs in the code charts are completely unfamiliar to them. It would be very sad if we added two new characters and invented glyphs for them because what the communities were actually using didn't fit our preconceived notions, on which nothing of any consequence depended.

     
    >without disturbing the identity of the already existing
    >encoded character, U+0294 LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP.

    Changing 0294 to Lu would not disturb or threaten its identity in the least. I've said that before, and nobody has offerred reasons to think otherwise.
     
     
     
    Peter Constable



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