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

On Feb 10, 2007, at 6:30 PM, T. A. McLeay wrote:

> On 11/02/07, Eric Christopherson <rakko@...> wrote:
>
>> Off topic: I have looked but haven't found any Unicode character for
>> a specifically seriffed <a>, i.e. the symbol for /a/. In the font I
>> use for email, the regular ASCII <a> looks identical to the "script
>> <a>", both looking like the symbol for /A/. Since I assume the actual
>> shape of the <a> glyph is up to the font designer, I would figure
>> Unicode would have a slot somewhere for an <a> unambiguously with
>> serif. Does anyone know if it in fact does? If not, has there been
>> any proposal or discussion to include one?
>
> No, there is no such glyph, and there's no chance of it being
> included. Just like Chinese vs Japanese fonts, if you need a glyph to
> look a particular way, you have to use a font that makes it look that
> way.
I understand that if two glyphs are just variant representations of
one character, Unicode leaves the representation up to the font
itself; but with script vs. print <a>, they seem to be clearly two
different *characters* with different functions within IPA. (After
all, if they weren't, we wouldn't even have the script <a> character.)

> (This is a bit different from the IPA script g vs regular g,
> because a single document will (non-contrastively) mix the two. But
> now that the IPA sanctions regular g with the IPA, I very much suspect
> that if Unicode was created today and didn't need to be backwards
> compatible with anything, it wouldn't contrast the two, in the same
> way it doesn't contrast Greek vs IPA beta.)
What was the original rationale for the <g> used in IPA? I'm glad to
hear that we can now use a "normal" <g>.

(I forgot to mention, also, that <ae> ligature and <oe> ligature in
this font look indistinguishable at normal size, although if I zoom
in far enough I can see a slight difference. I've also seen that in
italics in printed text. Perhaps I should change my font, but
otherwise I really like this one.)

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