Re: Fixing Two Unicode Asymmetries in case conversion

From: Michael Everson (everson@indigo.ie)
Date: Mon Nov 16 1998 - 11:14:26 EST


Ar 07:39 -0800 1998-11-16, scríobh John Cowan:
>Timothy Partridge wrote:
>
>> I agree that if in an English dictionary the IPA shouldn't be uppercased,
>> but I thought that some of the IPA letters were used as letters in some
>> African languages, and did have upper case equivalents.
>>
>> For example:
>> U+0259 LATIN SMALL LETTER SCHWA U+018F LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SCHWA
>
>Certainly. But in that case it is not IPA but some natural language.
>When I say IPA, I don't mean characters from the IPA Extensions block,
>but rather text in the International Phonetic Alphabet. IPA is
>unified with Latin in Unicode for pragmatic reasons, but it's really a
>separate script, because it doesn't have the Latin/Greek/Cyrillic
>concept of case.

Not at all. Of course IPA is Latin -- it simply doesn't make _use_ of case
distinctions, which is a matter of practicality to ensure simplicity and
legibility of transcriptions. The problem is that there are is currently a
unification of three Greek letters with three IPA letters, which means that
IPA users have to mix scripts when writing IPA, which has unfortunate
ramifications in things like sorting operations dealing with multilingual
text.

--
Michael Everson, Everson Gunn Teoranta ** http://www.indigo.ie/egt
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