From: Deborah W. Anderson (dwanders@pacbell.net)
Date: Wed Feb 18 2004 - 12:47:00 EST
A few comments on this thread:
Ken W. wrote:
> >Furthermore, Michael carefully dodged the point that all of these
> >Indo-European sources are *already* fonted, styled text. They
> >are *not* plain text, but mix italic citations with Roman forms.
> >Unless we are going to also head down the road of plain text
> >italic letter clones for Indo-European, all of this material already
> >has to be dealt with as rich text.
Michael E. replied:
> The run of the citations are italicized to set them off from the rest
> of the text. Same as with the UPA. This is not the same thing as
> saying that what's within the citations isn't required for plain-text
> representation.
Though these subscripted letters are most commonly italicized, they do
not occur solely so. (For an example of their non-italic use, see the
phonetic realization of the laryngeals at:
http://titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/didact/idg/idgphon.htm#XEN9, under
section 2, in the row for laryngeals. I am collecting other examples.)
I have seen reconstructed forms (which are typically italicized) also
set in plain text, and this may vary depending upon the style of a
publication or an author's style. (An example of setting reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European in plain text is: "Computational Cladistics and the
Position of Tocharian" by Don Ringe, Tandy Warnow, Ann Taylor, Alexander
Michailov, and Libby Levison, in _The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age
Peoples of Eastern Central Asia_, Vol. 1, ed. by V. Mair, Washington,
DC: Institute for the Study of Man, 1998, pp. 391-414).
Philippe added in his thoughts:
> But I still think it would be
> a bad prececent for Unicode if it starts accepting some very specific
>notational systems used in a fonted document written with a author's
>own choice, where subscripts/superscripts/italics would be used only in
>relation with author's specific notation
(In case Philippe was referring to the subscripted letters...)
The subscripted letters e/a/o are now adopted by many authors, and
appear, for example, in the _Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture_, ed.
by J. P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams (London and Chicago: Fitzroy
Dearborn,1997). This tome also uses the h with a subscript x, which has
also now been adopted by two new handbooks on Indo-European. (I will
track them down for examples.)
Debbie Anderson
Deborah Anderson
Researcher, Dept. of Linguistics
UC Berkeley
Email: dwanders@socrates.berkeley.edu
or dwanders@pacbell.net
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