From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Feb 17 2004 - 17:21:21 EST
From: <brian@gael-image.com>
> In addition, superscripts and subscripts for palatalization, velarization,
> aspiration, etc., already exist in the Unicode IPA block. It seems to me that
> the function of such glyphs is similar to that of a diacritic in that it
> modifies the meaning of the base glyph.
>
> How is the term "plain text" being used here? Is the distinction one between
> natural language and scientific notation?
My best response about it would be that "plain-text" does not require to
restrict to a natural language. After all decimal digits are not in the natural
language, it's a notational symbol that we do recognize as a needed character
(same thing for currency symbols, and even for many unspoken punctuations...)
We don't need to exclude symbols or notations from Unicode, which already
defines a full "S" category for them (as well as "N" for numeric symbols). So
why do you seem to suggest that IPA should not be there and considered as
"plain-text"?
Remember that even the scripts for natural languages are themselves conventional
notations. This is just enough to justify that other notations be included in
plain-text, as long as we can easily determine a distinctive "character"
identity in the candidate symbol, and a distinctive representative glyph or
text-control function, without implying necessarily a required layout or
appearance.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Feb 17 2004 - 17:56:56 EST