Re: Additional diacritics (was: Phonological equivalent of...)

Did this get to the list before?  All interfaces
but POP/SMTP suck, and you can quote me on that!

T. A. McLeay skrev:
> On 08/02/07, Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...> wrote:
>> Eric Christopherson ikri':
>>
>>
>> | And off-topic: Does anyone else think it would make
>> | sense to P instead of p\ for the voiceless bilabial
>> | fricative? The current P, the labiodental approximant,
>> | already has an alternate symbol, v\, which looks more
>> | like the actual IPA symbol. (Apologies if this has
>> | already been addressed!)
>>
>> Address the proposal to Tristan. My personal opinion:
>> that makes sense. I would support this amendment.
>
> I share Henrik's view on this. I've got over Kirsch. and
> the rest enough that I expect p\ for ɸ,
I *read* p\ correctly, but when I want to *type* a voiceless
bilabial fricative I always type P or F first -- each of
them about 50% of the time, then I think "s**t its p\!", or
I don't notice it at all. An unnecessary detour IMHO.
Everybody agrees B is the best choice for the voiced
bilabial fricative, and then the voiceless one *should* be
U. Then it's only natural you slip and type F soometimes!

> although I always use v\ for ʋ.
Me too, and m\ for the labiodental nasal, but I'm
repeating myself.

Moreover I think b\ and p\ should be (re)assigned to ȸ
U+0238 LATIN SMALL LETTER DB DIGRAPH and ȹ U+0239 LATIN
SMALL LETTER QP DIGRAPH

> (Anyone who thinks that P for ʋ is outrageous should get
> used to TIPA; it uses P for ʔ. I suppose at least they
> *look* similar.)
I don't think the argument that one shouldn't mend something
because something else is even worse broken is a very good
one. You should get around to mend both if you can and if
you need both. Now we can't mend TIPA(*), but we can and
should mend CXS. We created it in order to get rid of
various X-SAMPA annoyances or gaps, and if we progressively
find other things annoying or wanting we should update CXS
accordingly. Henrik's right we will need version numbers,
but isn't the whole idea of having version numbers that
things can be updated/revised with minimal confusion? Who
would want to still use HTML 1.0? Surely backwards
compatibility would be great, but we are working with a very
limited set of atoms (the ASCII characters) to express the
growing set of known possible speech sounds, so I don't
think we can allow ourselves the luxury of eschewing
reassignments -- in fact I think we *should* make them when
they increase the internal symmetry (I'd be wary to say
'logic') of the system.

> (BTW: Isn't it about time CXS was deprecated anyway? Can
> we send messages in Unicode happily enough on this list
> nowadays?[*] If so, my view is that CXS shouldn't change
> at all, and anyone unhappy with it should switch to
> Unicode. Is there anyone who can't view/enter IPA/Unicode,
> and can't reconfigure their computers to allow it?)
As others have said it is one thing to be able to read
Unicode and another to be able to type them. In fact I use
type my wiki and HTML pages using CXS and then convert them
with Henrik's Perl module.

(*) Rather than mending TIPA someone should develop a
version of TeX which (a) uses UTF-8 natively (b) allows the
user to define any escape sequence they damn well please for
any Unicode character and (c) allows the user to switch
between sets of such escapes at will.

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