From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Sat Sep 27 2008 - 12:32:00 CDT
Julian Bradfield wrote:
> Can anybody shed light for me on why Unicode includes
> LATIN SMALL LETTER GAMMA
> in the IPA Extensions block, but does not include special IPA versions
> of chi, phi, theta, which are no less typographically distinct from
> their Greek counterparts?
Looking at
http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/images/pulmonic.gif
I would say that chi and theta are rather typical appearances of Greek
letters. The phi is different, but to my eye, it's pretty normal _capital_
phi. The "LATIN SMALL LETTER GAMMA" (voiced velar fricative), U+0263, is
different from any rendering of the Greek letter gamma I've seen.
These are of course a matter of judgment, but I would expect that most
people familiar with Greek letters (as used in modern writing) would see the
situation as the Unicode standard sees them: some IPA symbols are actually
Greek letters used in a special meaning, whereas the symbol for the voiced
velar fricative is of its own kind - perhaps somewhat _similar_ to the
gamma, but it is not intuitively evident that it is even based on the gamma.
Calling it LATIN SMALL LETTER GAMMA is perhaps the most artificial part of
the solution. Well, maybe it is even more artificial that it has a mapping
to uppercase. After all, it is in the IPA Extensions block, IPA usage is the
only usage mentioned, and IPA is essentially caseless (though it includes
characters that are lowercase or uppercase letters in usage outside the
IPA).
-- Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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