From: Charlie Ruland ☘ (ruland@luckymail.com)
Date: Sun Mar 21 2010 - 17:25:42 CST
— — — Jukka K. Korpela wrote: — — —
> André Szabolcs Szelp wrote:
>>> There is a superscripted x, namely U+02E3, MODIFIER SMALL LETTER
>>> SMALL X, “ˣ”. I don’t know why it has been included and what it is
>>> used for, but I would guess it is used in some phonetic notations,
>>> or maybe in the writing system(s) of some small language(s).
>>
>> Jukka, you should know! ;-)
>
> Right, I should have remembed this notation, even though I don’t see
> it often
>
>> It's used recently in _Finnish_ phonemic notation (earlier people used
>> the apostrophe) to mark the silent phoneme which only appears as
>> sandhi gemination of the following initial consonant at the end of
>> words (mostly ending [orthographically] in -e, so phonemically in
>> [-eˣ]. (Historically -ˣ < -ʔ < -k).
>
> Well, it’s not a phoneme, it’s normally not silent, the word
> orthographically ends more often with some other vowel than -e, it has
> several origins (though -k is probably most common), and there is
> hardly a reason to postulate an intermediate phase of “-ʔ”, but most
> descriptions of the phenomenon are equally or more incorrect. But this
> is off-topic in the list, so I’ll just mention my treatise on the
> topic: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/suomi/cab.html
The Venetian phonetician Luciano Canepari calls a similar phenomenon in
standard Italian ‘co-gemination’, for which see chapter 3.3.2 (pp.
138ff.) of this document:
http://venus.unive.it/canipa/pdf/HPr_03_Italian.pdf
Professor Canepari uses —and this is more topical in this mail list— a
much expanded system of phonetic notation, with 52 basic vocoid symbols
(see fig. 8.3., p. 115, of
http://venus.unive.it/canipa/pdf/HPh_08_Vowels.pdf ) and several hundred
contoid symbols (see fig. 10.1., pp. 166ff., of
http://venus.unive.it/canipa/pdf/HPh_10_Consonants.pdf et passim, as
well as a minor expansion in
http://venus.unive.it/canipa/pdf/5_New_contoid_pairs.pdf ), let alone
other symbols (the most frequent of which are listed in fig. 1.35., p.
38f., of http://venus.unive.it/canipa/pdf/HPr_01_Prelude.pdf ).
He calls his approach ‘Natural Phonetics’ and this style of notation
‘canIPA’. It seems that he and his students/alumni/followers have
published a number of books and other printed matter using canIPA, which
might therefore be sufficiently widespread to warrant encoding in Unicode.
You can visit Professor Canepari’s home page at
http://venus.unive.it/canipa/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=en:start .
Charlie
>
>> e.g.
>> o.: vaatekauppa, pht.: [vaatekkauppa], phm.: /vaateˣ + kauppa/
>
> The phonetic notation is probably sufficient for the illustrative
> purpose, but in IPA notation, it would rather be [ˈʋɑːtekˌkɑuppɑ].
>
> Anyway, “ˣ” can indeed be regarded as a modifier letter here even in
> the concrete sense that an intuitive reading of the words “modifier
> letter” suggests. It does not modify the preceding letter, as
> modifiers often do, but it indicates a modification (gemination) of
> the pronunciation of the _following_ letter.
-- 孔曰 書不盡言 言不盡意 Confucius said: Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.
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