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

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. (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.)

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