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

On Feb 8, 2007, at 5:52 AM, Henrik Theiling wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Mark J. Reed writes:
>> I disagree on both counts.  The only reason CXS exists is that we
>> were
>> dissatisfied, as a group, with X-SAMPA.  We could just use X-SAMPA
>> and be
>> done with it, but as long as we have our own version, there's no
>> reason not
>> to extend it and even change it.  Arbitrary changes should be
>> avoided, of
>> course, but logical ones should be adopted if there's enough support.
>
> Well, well, *please* add a version number to CXS when changing it now!
>
> And *please* add a remark to all your posts which one you use.  With
> /v\/ vs. /p\/, this is not really obvious (in contrast to the
> different accent marks, which are quite obvious immediately).
I might be alone here, but I find it confusing that " can mean either
primary or secondary stress. I suppose it should be obvious, if there
are two different stress marks in a word, that one is primary and the
other is secondary; but it isn't intuitive to me that ' is primary
and " is secondary, since I'm more used to X-SAMPA, in which " is
primary. (I suppose a mnemonic would be that ' looks like a "prime"
mark and " looks like a "double prime"... but still, my X-SAMPA
familiarity predisposes me to first think the " marks primary accent,
which I then must "correct".)

>
> Extensions are fine, but I'm quite pessimistic wrt. incompatible
> changes and hereby predict confusion.
>
> **Henrik
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?

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