From: vlad (emperor.vlad@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Mar 22 2005 - 04:14:04 CST
This certainly is an issue, I think. While LATIN LETTER ALPHA has
restricted variation--it can only appear with the glyph needed for
phonetic transcription--LATIN SMALL LETTER A does not: it may appear
with either the two-storey glyph or the one-storey (the latter
especially in italic fonts, but also in a fair few non-italic fonts).
This means that not all fonts can be used for phonetics, and (if
you're putting text on a website, say) you can have no guarantee that
it will be displayed correctly on the viewer's end. And it won't
simply display as a box or other glyph to let the user know that his
or her software cannot display the appropriate character--it will
display as a different glyph that, in this context, is misleading.
Perhaps Unicode should have a standard variant sequence for LATIN
SMALL LETTER A, to ensure that the appropriate glyph is selected?
On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 12:54:44 +1100, Alec Coupe <A.Coupe@latrobe.edu.au> wrote:
>
> Dear list members,
>
> I would like to know why 'lower case a' is converted to 'script a' when it
> is italicized in unicode. This is a considerable hindrance in linguistic
> transcription because 'lower case a' represents Cardinal Vowel 4, while
> 'script a' represents Cardinal Vowel 5. For non-linguists, the difference is
> demonstrated by the Australian English versus the southern British English
> pronunciation of 'a' in 'father'. Since the majority of publishers require
> language examples to be differentiated from text by italic face, this
> potentially makes unicode a less than adequate font for linguistic
> description.
>
> Dr Alec Coupe
> ARC Postdoctoral Fellow
> Linguistics Program
> La Trobe University
> Bundoora, Melbourne 3086
> Australia
>
> Tel. +61 3 9479-3297
> Fax +61 3 9479-1520
>
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