Re: Phonetics

"Mark J. Reed" wrote:
>
>We're talking about Unicode, which is based on the idea that abstract
>characters exist. Regardless of your opinion on that point, the
>decision was made long ago.
I think we're talking about different levels of abstraction. Certainly
Unicode does not define any caracters in the terms of how *exactly* they
look like - but they do have an underlying geometrical structure. Or would
you say that the star symbol you get when pressing the, say, "r" key while
using a dingbats font is still, on some abstract level, a letter "r"? And I
don't mean the IPA codepoint (if this is a dodgily made Dingbats font.)


>Given that framework, then, are c with
>comma below and c with cedilla alloglyphs?
It completely depends on how do you define "alloglyph". "Same Unicode
entity" would be circularish logic, and dependant on the font anyway. "Same
usage", yes, but likewise c with caron, tee-esh digraph, etc; and I think
adding "same origin" to that would giv an answer of "no", tho the diareses /
umlaut precedent suggests that this combo is not the way to go. I see it
coming down to "variations on a basic shape", and at that point my answer is
"no". You can certainly use them as allo*graphs* (representations of the
same sound), but they are no more allo*glyphs* than o-with-umlaut and "oe"
are (synchronically.)


>As for the three A's, they come from three separate alphabets.  It
>would be quite odd to mix alphabets within a single word.
Not too long ago, letters like o-with-umlaut vs. n-with-tilde were also
considered to come from separate alphabets (eg German vs. Spanish), and
arguably they still are. Yet nobody says you cannot use both when devising a
writing system for a language. Also, Japanese, IPA, etc.


>More importantly, you would lose the ability to map each letter to its
>lowercase equivalent.
Which is probably the main reason the alphabets are considered distinct, tho
I wonder how offen it would come handy. The distinction between different
upper case <> lower case mappings, especially.

John Vertical

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