canIPA worth being encoded? [was: Re: super- and subscripted characters]

From: Charlie Ruland ☘ (ruland@luckymail.com)
Date: Sun Mar 21 2010 - 17:25:42 CST

  • Next message: Andr Szabolcs Szelp: "Re: super- and subscripted characters"

    — — — 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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