Re: USAGE: Latin alphabet (Re: Chinese Dialect Question)

On 7 Oct 2003 at 23:43, J Y S Czhang wrote:

>     The only other alphabet in the world that has the upside-down 'e' is the
> IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet, used by lexicographers and linguists).
Are you sure? I don't have any research immediately to hand, but that
statement does not ring true.

For example, Unicode has "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SCHWA" as well as
"LATIN CAPITAL LETTER REVERSED E", and notes that these are not glyph
variants. The existence of two capital forms implies the existence of
two lower-case forms in two scripts. Since the IPA is uncial, i.e.
does not have a case distinction, neither script is the IPA.

Also, I know that Azerbaijani uses the capital turned e that looks
like a big schwa, or at least it did during the cyrillic period. This
is a further inference that the "turned capital E" form comes from a
real language, and not from IPA, since if IPA had a case distinction,
my gut tells me that it too would use the "big schwa" glyph.

I could go on a research spree, but I want to make sure that you said
exactly what you mean before I do so.




Paul

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