From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Sat Apr 02 2005 - 11:32:21 CST
At 05:24 -0800 2005-04-02, Patrick Andries wrote:
>>If the mark of implosivity were encoded as separate, then yes,
>>you'd have to have to do extra work to get the fused forms.
>
>[PA] Given what the Devanagari rendering engines already do
>(conjuncts, virama, handling of ra), this may not be such a problem
>if they were benefits to encoding a productive separate combining
>mark.
I do not believe that there are; nor do I believe that this combining
mark is productive.
>>Implosive consonants are rare, for one. IPA gives symbols for five
>>of them, four of which are used in Sindhi (BBA 0253, DDDA 0257, GGA
>>0260, JJA 0284). The one which isn't is the voiced uvular implosive
>>(029B). Devanagari doesn't have a symbol for the voiced uvular stop
>>(0262) either. The IPA Handbook gives Mam (a Mayan language) as
>>using the voiced uvular implosive.
>
>[PA] Thank you for these precisions, which I think should have been
>in the proposal
It did not occur to me that it was necessary as it seemed self-evident.
>a combining mark will not be very productive here since the set of
>implosives does not seem to be open.
>
>Well, technically, I suppose, all of these phonetic sets are closed,
>but here the set is apparently of known cardinality and of very
>small cardinality.
"Cardinality" is apparently a mathematical term meaning "the number
of elements in a set or other grouping, as a property of that
grouping". Accordingly, I have no idea what you are talking about.
When I propose characters for encoding, I look at the evidence of
their usage. In this case, the letter-modification interacts with the
base character in the same way as the horizontal bar does in Latin,
as I pointed out earlier. Our practice is to encode such characters
uniquely, and not to try to rely on smart fonts to render them
correctly. Further, as I pointed out, there is an advantage here to
allow the matras attach directly to the implosive letters, rather
than to allow a possible spelling difference by introducing a
combining mark, particularly as there is already a similar combining
mark that has a different behaviour but a similar shape.
I trust that the UTC and WG2 will approve these characters as proposed.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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