Re: Bantu click letters

From: jcowan@reutershealth.com
Date: Thu Jun 10 2004 - 12:50:50 CDT

  • Next message: Peter Constable: "RE: Bantu click letters"

    Michael Everson scripsit:

    > You have a weird view of the history of phonetics, John. You haven't
    > addressed the substantive issue: these are Latin characters used to
    > represent sounds which in 1925 could not easily be represented.

    And never have been represented thus since. In their day, there were
    probably a lot more documents using LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ANTISIGMA
    and LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H LEFT HALF than one, yet they are not
    encoded either. (Though LATIN CAPITAL LETTER TURNED F is.)

    > Indeed, there are click letters like the STRETCHED C
    > which did get into IPA and were later deprecated. So you can
    > represent the STRETCHED C in chu: as Doke writes it (as do Pullum and
    > Ladusaw, using Doke's diacritics as well) but you can't represent
    > Doke's other letters? This doesn't make sense.

    It makes sense because others used STRETCHED C (and indeed it was
    part of the standard for a while), but no one has used OWL before or since.

    -- 
    John Cowan      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan      jcowan@reutershealth.com
    Be yourself.  Especially do not feign a working knowledge of RDF where
    no such knowledge exists.  Neither be cynical about RELAX NG; for in
    the face of all aridity and disenchantment in the world of markup,
    James Clark is as perennial as the grass.  --DeXiderata, Sean McGrath
    


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