From: verdy_p (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Aug 12 2009 - 10:59:44 CDT
"Andreas Stötzner" wrote:
> There seems to be repeated confusion about Greek minuscules beta and
> theta when it comes to their usage in phonetic context (IPA). Whereas a
> “Latin alpha†has been granted its separat codepoint at 0251 the β and
> θ have to be represented based on the common Greek codepoints 03B2 and
> 03B8 even in IPA environments. For those two characters (as for the
> ‘alpha’ 0251) a proprietary ‘latinised’ glyph tradition exists in
> phonetics, requiring a distinct Latin-style glyph moulding opposite to
> the more traditional Greek-style moulding.
This Latin alpha is NOT proprietary for IPA environments. It is actually used for writing African languages that make
distinctions (at least between the lowercase letters a and alpha, even if no distinction is kept for the capital A or
Alpha, used much less often and at least not as an initial letter).
There are other African letter pairs, like the Latin small esh, whose capital looks like a capital Sigma: such pairs
should be encoded distinctly to preserve the semantics when performing case conversions (the Latin esh is single-cased
traditionally in Latin languages, and the lower case version of Greek Sigma is not a good choice when it looks too
much like a Latin letter o with horn, the same letter used for example in Vietnamese).
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