From: D. Starner (shalesller@writeme.com)
Date: Sat Mar 06 2004 - 20:34:53 EST
Peter Kirk <peterkirk@qaya.org> writes:
> but then there could well be a dictionary out
> there somewhere which uses one of your supposedly equivalent ligatures
> for the voiced th and another one for the unvoiced th.
So we make decisions based on one _hypothetical_ dictionary? I've
got a grammar here that uses a Fraktur ch as a phonetic symbol;
I've got a book on the sounds of German and English that uses various
small capital letters as phonetic symbols, some of which weren't in
Unicode last time I checked (pre-4.0); I've got a dictionary that
uses Arabic numerals as combining superscripts; and I've got a book
on Chakquiel that uses Latin letter Tresillo and Quatrillo that I'd
really like to put online. All of these are _real_ books, yet no one
is rushing to make changes solely based on them. (Which is not to slight
the people who actually are working on Tresillo and Quatrillo, but the
holdup is finding other usages.)
The correct behavior is take a large-print copy of the Handbook of the
IPA and beat the publishers about the head until they start using real
symbols. As a fall-back plan, as that may be illegal in some states,
we might encode a th-ligature or point to t-<zwj>-h. But encoding a
bunch of th ligatures that exist _because_ there's nothing standardized
and imagine that they might be used somewhere in a way that someone not
obsessing about legitimate font changes might care about is absurd.
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