Re: On the upcoming LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL Q

I meant that morphological glosses (such as the Leipzig standard) style
tags in small-caps. Like this:

    yukkuri-ni yom-i-mas-i-ta
    carefully-ADV read-CON-POL-CON-PRF

These are traditionally set in small-caps, not capitals. If the
phonologists are getting small-caps into plain text, why not the
morphologists? If the only argument for Q is that there is an /ʀ/, why not
the full set, and then you can write any morphological tag? The chance of
confusing "CON" with a word is greater than that of /Q/ or [Q], if anything.

2016/12/26 3:28 "Yifán Wáng" <747.neutron_at_gmail.com>:

> Agreed with Yifán Wáng... But I wonder about the need for the character in
> the first place. Are we going to add a full small-caps set, too, given its
> use in morphological glosses? Isn't it enough to use a regular 'Q' in
> plain-text, and style to small caps in rich text?

No, it's not in "morphological glosses" but phonological notations
such as /yuQkuri/. In morphological discussions, phonological details
are usually ignored and they just write down the surface forms.

> I can see the rationale for mathematical bold, given that a regular-weight
> plain-text character would stand for a different thing in mathematical
> formulæ. But there's no way a capital Q would ever be confused as anything
> other than the phoneme, in a Japanese phonological transcription.

I don't think Q is, but it should be in unison with its fellows /ɴ/,
/ʀ/, /ʜ/ etc. Some books make all of them capitals, but others all
small capitals.
Making into small capitals avoids possible confusions with variables
like /C/ or /V/.

2016-12-26 5:03 GMT+09:00 Leonardo Boiko <leoboiko_at_gmail.com>:
> Agreed with Yifán Wáng... But I wonder about the need for the character in
> the first place. Are we going to add a full small-caps set, too, given its
> use in morphological glosses? Isn't it enough to use a regular 'Q' in
> plain-text, and style to small caps in rich text?
>
> I can see the rationale for mathematical bold, given that a regular-weight
> plain-text character would stand for a different thing in mathematical
> formulæ. But there's no way a capital Q would ever be confused as anything
> other than the phoneme, in a Japanese phonological transcription.
>
> 2016/12/25 17:56 "Yifán Wáng" <747.neutron_at_gmail.com>:
>
> Please excuse my serial posting.
>
> I recently noticed the subhead given to the LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL
> Q in the following document (at A7AF) is "Letter for representation of
> morpheme in Japanese".
> http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16381-n4778r-pdam1-2-charts.pdf
>
> However, to my knowledge, the letter is required for describing a
> "phoneme" of Japanese that isn't tied to specific "morphemes" (~
> "words"). I have contacted the original writer of the proposal:
> http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15241-small-cap-q.pdf
> and he agrees with me in this regard.
>
> Thus I suppose "Letter for Japanese phonology" would be more desired a
> heading for this character, though subheads are not normative. What
> are your thoughts?
>
>
Received on Mon Dec 26 2016 - 03:38:37 CST