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

On 09/02/07, Benct Philip Jonsson <conlang@...> wrote:

> 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!
Perhaps then P could be allowed as either p\ or v\, and simply require
the author to specify if it's unclear. ("P=phi" is easier to remember
than "CXS 2.3".) In either case, p\ and v\ should be the recommended
CXS for the two symbols.

> > 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
Now that idea I am wholly against. It's one thing to redefine an
unrecommended symbol when there's perceived to be a problem. It's
another thing to redefine a default symbol for something to a
character that isn't even standard IPA.
...

> > (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.
True; I suppose I'm just strange to have almost all IPA chars at my
fingertips... Still, I think it's the way we should be going even if
we can't get there just yet...

> (*) 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.
Take a look at XeTeX or Omega; the latter's OTPs sound almost exactly
like what you want. For standard TeX you can enter Unicode chars with
the utf-8 inputenc mode and the UCS package, but this just converts
utf-8 characters to commands defined in other packages to produce
that. There's also work going on integrating Omega with pdfTex as well
as the Lua scripting language into LuaTeX (by the people who brought
us pdfTeX & ConTeXt mostly), which will probably be able to do almost
everything anyone ever wants TeX-like systems to do...

--
Tristan.

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