From: Andrew C. West (andrewcwest@alumni.princeton.edu)
Date: Tue May 27 2003 - 04:50:13 EDT
Thanks to everyone who responded. I apologise for asking the question and then
disappearing, but a bank holiday sneaked up on me, and off I was on a family
outing rather than being glued to my computer all day !
For those who asked why I needed a Null consonant symbol in the first place, I
am thankful to Peter for giving a good summary of the possible circumstances
where a null consonant (or indeed vowel, as was pointed out) may need to be
represented. My own reasons for wanting such a symbol are for :
A table of syllables, with initials along the Y-axis (e.g. [t-], [d-], [n-],
[NULL-] etc.) and finals along the X-axis (e.g. [-ai], [-an], [-am] etc.).
Giving the IPA value of letters, where one of the letters represents a null
consonant used simply as a placeholder for vowels (e.g. U+0F68 TIBETAN LETTER A).
Showing historical phonetic changes of the sort *j- -> NULL-.
The consensus of opinion seems to be to use U+2205 EMPTY SET for my required
purpose. This makes sense to me, and I will amend my pages accordingly.
Regards,
Andrew
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue May 27 2003 - 05:41:32 EDT