CB ASCII/IPA Help Needed.

Hi All ;-)

I'm reworking CB because I've been told that many characters outside the
ascii range will now display on any system (I was rather surprised not
to find /.oe/ and /.OE/ on the current character map though) and because
I've refined the visual ligature system.

It would help me greatly if MAC, UNIX etc users would tell me if the
characters shown below display properly on their systems;
æ ash,
ç c cedilla,
ð eth,
ø stoked o,
þ thorn,
ß german double S,
¿ upside down ?,
µ greek mu,
¶ paragraph sign,
© copyright sign,
¥ Yen sign,
£ pound sign,
¢ cents sign,
€ the Euro sign
§ section sign,
¨ high level umlaut,
¯ high level line,
° high level square,
« » french double quote marks open and close,
‘ ’ "smart" open and close quotes,
´ acute,
½ a half sign,
¡ an upside down !.
(and how different is it from i to you?)
| an upright line
¦ a split upright line.

I want to use some of the above to replace sets of symbols used in CB.
Ok it increases what has to be memorized but the payback is faster
writing and reading with less "working out" to do. Others are just
preferential, I thing that the Euro symbol makes a better looking vowel
for /E/ and /€/ is closer visually to the original IPA symbol.

I want to use the two line types to differentiate between clicks and
foot groups, but if not everyone can see the difference them there goes
another fine idea :-(

Has anyone any suggestions for the two "gammas" voiced velar fricative
and unrounded close-mid back vowel, or the labiodental approximate? So
far all I've got is .&V .&v and |/, none of which I'm happy with. (&
means imagine a loop added to the next character) suggestions so far
have been to use ; with x (and as an x is the same upside down ; would
take on the meaning reverse the voicing) a V or % for the vowel, and .u)
or .v) or ;n for the approximate. Any ideas? I must admit I like ;x V
and ;n best so far.

As "Dark L" /.~l/, and the africates ch /.tS/ and j /.dZ/ are so common
and turn up in conlangs so often I'm thinking of allowing the use of the
english pound sign for dark L and C and J for the common africates. I'm
also thinking of using the copyright symbol for the bilabial click, and
the pair of the upside down ! and Yen sign for the close central pair
instead of /.-i/ and /.-u/. Finally I'm thinking permitting the use of
the dollar sign $ for the asian phoneme /.ts/ ( . not only stands for
ligature but ties too). and ;$ for /.dz/.

I know the suggestions in the last paragraph are not strictly IPA, but
they're common phonemes and I think simple symbols for them would be
useful for conlangers. Comments?

I Intend posting the fully re-worked CB system to this list. Alas I've
all the web skills of a dyslexic donkey so I can not put it on a web
page, but if anyone wants to host web page or two showing how it all
fits together I'd be happy to help. I could do pages on my dedicated DTP
computer which could then just be scanned in as gifs of jpegs.

Barbara

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