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A Proposition

From:David Peterson <digitalscream@...>
Date:Thursday, March 22, 2001, 10:26
    You know, we're all trying to write to each other with things that sort
of represent different versions of the IPA, and it's really confusing (at
least to me).  I have a solution (that is, if everyone is writing from either
a Mac or IBM clone).  There's this website:

                            <http://user.dtcc.edu/~berlin/fonts.html>

It's called Dr. Berlin's Foreign Font archive.  Aside from having every
script known to man (except Klingon), it has IPA fonts.  There are two.  The
first package (the SIL package) has three fonts which have easy access to all
the symbols.  It's the best IPA font there is.  But, the other package, which
has one font (Kansas University Linguistics IPA; it'll show up as Kuldipa) is
fantastic in another way.  In it, you can write all the Roman characters
(upper and lower case, numbers and punctuation), AND all the IPA symbols.
The only drawback is that the IPA symbols are in weird, out of the way
places.  Nevertheless, if you're willing to learn how to use it (you can even
make a little chart as to how to make what characters; I did myself), I think
it could greatly improve our communication if we all wrote in that font.
    If you go to the website and download the font, it will be in Windows
format.  If you're a Mac user (like me), they have a font converter program
called "TTF Converter", I believe, and all you have to do is drag the font
over the icon and it will change any Windows font into a Mac, suitcased font.
 It's wonderful.  Anyway, this is my idea, and I think it would really
benefit us all if we at least tried it.

-Jenesis

P.S.: I decided to do a quick rundown of my first language (the one I've been
working on since last November), and, by doing some estimating (my dictionary
has entries by triconsonantal root, so I counted up the roots, estimated 5-7
lexemes per root), my first language (called Megdevi) has 3,855 words (low
end) to 5,335 words (high end).  The document itself on my computer is about
110 pages long.  And I used the Kansas University font for the whole thing
<plug>

Replies

Irina Rempt <ira@...>
Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Frank George Valoczy <valoczy@...>