On 06/04/2001 06:54:40 AM Marco Cimarosti wrote:
I find this interesting because of some similar issues in relation to
phonetic / phonemic transcription.
>I can see are at least 4 approaches to solve this problem, 3 of which
>require to file in a proposal:
>
>1) Apply the "superscript" font property to ordinary "e" and "i".
>(Contra: solution cannot be used in plain text)
One might argue that, in this situation, it's still legible: i 3i italiani
/ le 3e italiane. There's a similar issue in phonemic transcription,
though: superscripts get used with particular semantics that would be lost
in plain text. For example "agba" would mean something different from
"a<sup>g</sup>ba" -- the linguist is making specific interpretations of the
sound stream in relation to the phonological system of the latter and, in
the former, is claiming two consonant phonemes of equal status while in the
latter is claiming there is only one consonant phoneme that has a secondary
articulation. In plain text, this meaning is completely lost.
>2) Propose two new characters in the Letterlike Symbols block
(tentatively:
>*U+213B "(ITALIAN) FEMININE PLURAL ORDINAL INDICATOR" and *U+213C
"(ITALIAN)
>MASCULINE PLURAL ORDINAL INDICATOR").
>
>3) Propose two new characters in the Superscripts and Subscripts block
>(tentatively: *U+2090 and *U+2091, same names as in point 2).
No, I wouldn't do either of those.
>4) Unify the masculine indicator with Unicode 3.2's U+2071 "SUPERSCRIPT
>LATIN SMALL LETTER I" and only propose the feminine indicator
(tentatively:
>*U+2072 "SUPERSCRIPT LATIN SMALL LETTER E").
Yes, I'd do that. In fact, I've been pondering the merits of proposing a
number of additional superscripts of phonetic symbols for the reason
described above. I just haven't had a chance to do anything on that yet. a
superscript e would definitely be in that set (all IPA vowel symbols would
be since any vowel quality can be used in dipthongs, and dipthongs are one
of the situations in which some linguists want to use superscripts).
Another option is to add more to the Spacing Modifier Letters block. I
suspect what would be needed for phonemic transcriptions might exceed the
36 open codepoints in that block and the Superscripts and Subscripts
blocks.
>(Contra: the U+2071, used as a math symbol, should be coherent with U+207F
>"SUPERSCRIPT LATIN SMALL LETTER N" but, used as an ordinal indicator,
should
>be coherent with U+00AA and U+00BA, hence a possible problems for fonts).
What do you mean by "coherent with"? I don't see any reason why 2071
couldn't be used as a math symbol, as an ordinal indicator in Italian, or
as a phonetic symbol. If you are talking about appearance (you want the
ordinal indicators to have a line underneath the letter), that is
definitely a display issue: not all fonts do that for 00AA and 00BB, and a
font feature could be used in a given font to turn that on or off.
- Peter
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:18 EDT