Re: Phonetics

>On 3/23/07, Benct Philip Jonsson <conlang@...> wrote:
> > Unicode doesn't distinguish very clearly between cedilla and
> > comma below. The canonical shape used in Latvian and
> > Rumanian is comma, while the Turkish is cedilla. The
> > confusing names are a holdover from a time when one thought
> > the Turkish and Romanian forms could be considered variants
> > of one another.
>
>Why shouldn't they be? Are they not in complementary distribution (one
>in Turkish, the other in Latvian and Romanian), for starters?
Many glyphs, even with similar meanings, are in complementary distribution -
I don't see how that is enuff grounds to consider them alloglyphs. How
about, say, tilde over vs. ogonek?


>And besides, the actual shape of cedilla can vary... I've seen an
>Albanian write the ç in her name so that it looked like a lower-case c
>with an inverted hacek (or a circumflex) below, for example.
All's fair in handwriting. A few of my professors write kappa as identical
in form to the lower-case ae digraph.


>At any rate, I've always taken the variants with comma below and with
>cedilla below to be a glyph issue: alloglyphs of the same diacritic...
>a bit like the apostrophe-after vs. caron-above issue with letters Dd
>and Tt (cf. &#270;&#271;, &#356;&#357;).
Yeah, that's pretty much an equal case.


>Can you say why you think they cannot be considered glyph variants of
>the same abstract diacritic?
Because they have clearly different shapes & "abstract diacritics" do not
exist? Okay, maybe not all that different... But they're even historically
separate, aren't they?


>Compare also ó, where the accent "should" have a different slope
>depending on whether you're writing Spanish or Polish (see
>http://www.twardoch.com/download/polishhowto/kreska.html , for
>example, where "acute" and "kreska" are constrasted).
And an umlaut "should" differ from a diareses both by location and by cursiv
form, etc. This is where standardization comes in. I wouldn't actually mind
seeing the cedilla and comma belo merged, but at least fonts should then be
consistent about which they display. (And then you would have a pretty good
case for considering them alloglyphs.)


>Is this case not similar? The same abstract character with two
>different, language-specific, glyph realisations?
>Cheers,
>--
>Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
IMO "abstract character", I mean any more abstract than the basic
geometrical structure, is an oxymoron. Is it abstract, or is it written?
Frex how do we determine which representations of /S/ are the same "abstract
character"? Is s-caron also one? Esh? <sh>?

(OTOH I also don't see how, for example, A differs from &#913; (Greek)
differs from &#1040; (Cyrillic).)

John Vertical

_________________________________________________________________
Windows Live Messenger - kivuttoman viestinnän puolestapuhuja.
http://www.communicationevolved.com/fi-fi/

Reply